RPG Maker

FINALLY, after many years of rumors and cancellations of its arrival in the states, RPG Maker -- an ASCII born game -- will hit the shores very soon. Have you always been wanting to make your own epic adventure, but wasn't computer literate enough (as in programming languages like VB and C++) or rich enough to by Sony's Net Yaroze? Or was you turned off by the difficulty of making games like the aforementioned ways? Well, look no more, fear no more, and worry no more, because RPG Maker, a Playstation title, is on its way, which will allow you to craft your own grand, RPG adventure from scratch, without the confusing techniques programmers and developers must go through. Pumped yet, RPGer's? I sure am...

To begin with, the game will offer a sample game built onto the CD. The sample game is somewhat of an adventure, but it is more of a tutorial to get you accustomed to the games many functions, capabilities, editors, and so on. As you are playing through it, it will tell you what does what, and possibly allow you to edit certain things when the in-game instructions tells you to do so, being very similar to interactive tutorials.

If you've tackled the tutorial, or just skipped it, it's off to make your own grand adventure. But, expect to sit up many a night working on this, as you'll probably not be producing quality stuff in just a week or so. It might take months to complete a grand adventure, and dare I say years (if you are hard-core and very serious about doing so)!

Lucky for the ones who know nothing about programming or advanced image editing, RPG Maker has its own built-in menus and interfaces that allow for easy image crafting/editing/refining, and gameplay control (among various other features). The image editor allows you to customize images, produce animations, edit existing ones (there's a bunch of existing images and animations to work with if you are not up to the task of doing it yourself), create images.....the list just goes on. Also, there are music samples to put into your game, dialogue editor (probably a tedious task putting all of the text in by controller), enemy placement, encounter rates, character/enemy statistics, cutscene editor, title screen editor, magic editor (to create and name your own spells)....just about anything you could ever imagine will be at your control. Even the finest, most cryptic details of RPG design will be there. For example, you can assign "events" to certain parts of the game. Events would have the person playing your game to go out and collect "the undead hero's sword, and returning it to the King of Marbleberry, which, in return, he would open up a secret room of his castle for you to collect mightily expensive treasures." Of course, the scenarios can and would be different than that, but you can basically make anything like that. Once you have finally crafted your RPG, (a normal game would take up two spaces of memory on your memory card, unless you use custom art and make it really long I believe, which would be about 15 - ??), you could use the DexDrive to upload your creation to the 'net, where people can play it. Cool, huh?

Due out this fall, RPG Maker is sure to be a great developmental game overall, regardless of its dated, graphical showing. RPG Maker will have that certain audience of gamers, who have long wanted to make an RPG adventure themselves, their RPG "dream". Perhaps this will win some people over to go into the realm of "game design". Perhaps this game will be an innovative product, but fail due to the lackluster interfaces, steep learning curve, and just the sheer amount of time that the game has to be spent on (*cough*Fighter Maker*cough*). Perhaps I should shut up now. Anyway, look for RPG Maker around August or September sometime, and be ready to set aside some serious time if you are serious about this game.

Posted: 7-6-00