The Gaming Den

What experience do people have with the various toolkits and development engines and so on? This could be a general discussion thread for answering each others' questions or offering suggestions, even reviewing them.

All I can really comment on is RPGMaker VX Ace. I think I already reviewed it before, basically it's decent, but unless you're going to get into its code, it's pretty limited. Still, if someone is asking "How can I _____?" I might have an answer there.

Anyone have experience with GameGuru or MyRPGMaster? I'm sort of looking for something like what they appear to be, where it's mostly visual design, object-oriented where you morph the terrain and plonk shit down in a window, and then use a relatively simple scripting thing to set values and traits and to work out dialogue trees and everything.

Koumei wrote:and then use a relatively simple scripting thing to set values and traits and to work out dialogue trees and everything.

Sorry for being unhelpful, but since it's a free-for-all, what do you use to work out dialogue trees and everything? Basically, I need a tool to

- write huge-ass dialogue forests with variables and conditionals, preferably with variable checks within text snippets, too, so as not to maintain hundreds of thousands of variants of the same snippet, like - compile and run said forests;
- do some rudimentary bug tracking (locating and watching variables).

Koumei wrote:.

All I can really comment on is RPGMaker VX Ace. I think I already reviewed it before, basically it's decent, but unless you're going to get into its code, it's pretty limited. Still, if someone is asking "How can I _____?" I might have an answer there.

Can I make something like Chrono Trigger with that? By that I mean...

-Enemies visible in dungeons and moving around
-Combat is not its own screen, but part of dungeon
-Position based attacks, like Chrono spin slashing or Robo tackling everyone in a line.

OgreBattle wrote:Can I make something like Chrono Trigger with that? By that I mean...

-Enemies visible in dungeons and moving around
-Combat is not its own screen, but part of dungeon
-Position based attacks, like Chrono spin slashing or Robo tackling everyone in a line.

First one's easy, the second and third require custom scripts but have been done multiple times in previous RPG Maker games.

Yeah, it's piss-easy to have wandering monsters in the style of Hyperdimension Neptunia, Grandia or Mugen Souls: set the critters to move like NPCs, with a "if you touch them, initiate a combat with X, then switch it off (permanent) or delete it (respawns when you enter the area again)" deal.

You could even make it so if you press the interact button (or a specifically bound "swing sword" button) while adjacent and facing, it initiates combat with you taking them by surprise.

But turning combat into a grid-based thing, while doable, requires a lot of custom scripting.

I think you mentioned using Flash once. I'm rather fond of it myself and it's my go to for prototyping anything involving 2D graphics (including simply drawing some).

Unity lets you plop down stuff anywhere and add scripts to them. Scripts can be set up so that you can just change values around in the editor (you can put in check boxes and sliders so if you plop down multiple objects of the same type into the game world and you can then click individual ones and screw around with the sliders).