silly goober

P L U G I N S. USE THEM. THEY WILL SAVE YOU SO MUCH TIME.

Plugins are pretty much little bits of programming that you can add to your project to change your game. It’s pretty useful if you know how to program, but if you’re like me, it is REALLY USEFUL because there’s a lot of really talented people doing some great plugins out there. (iirc rpgmaker ace uses “scripts” instead of plugins.) Plugins in MV are .js files! To add them to your game, drop the js file into your project’s folder>js, and then in rpgmaker go to tools>plugin manager, and select the file through here. I am writing this down because it took me a good long while to find out.

As for great plugins, i CANNOT recommend yanfly’s enough. They have a bundle of their whole library for 30$ and imo it is a MUST BUY. Other notable plugin makers are GALV, Himeworks and moghunter. Also if you got rpgmaker’s dlc there’s plugins in your rpgmaker local folder. Took me months to even realize.

A few more things about plugins:

-if you use a plugin, CREDIT THE MAKER!!! I recommend making a list of the plugins youre using along with the creator’s terms of use-- some might be fine with just being credited, but some might ask for you to contact them first. Some of those plugins might be a few years old and you might not be able to contact the creator-- on my end I tried to leave a comment somewhere on their website at least.

-some dont play nice with one another and might create bugs! Sometimes it’s just a matter of reordering them in the plugin manager (higher plugins take priority or smg? usually plugins tell you where to place them, like “put this one at the top so it doesnt break stuff”).

-usually if i had like something i wanted to do in rpgmaker (like... having a visible hp bar for enemies) i’d just type “hp bar enemies rpgmaker” on google and it usually did the trick. rpgmakercentral is a great ressource

-If you get a bug theres a 90% chance it’s because of your plugins. In that case the fastest way to find out which one is to turn off all your plugins and turn them on one by one until the bug happens. then you have found The Culprit and can act appropriately

MEMORY

Um when youre maybe 40% done you should play your game with the task manager open so you can see how much memory your game uses. As a reference I think mine runs around 300-500MB, which is fine and works on most computers. (i think omori is 600MB?) You should do this just in case because you might find out your game runs at upwards of, uh, 3 gigabites of memory or something. It is absolutely not something that happened to me. No siree. It definitely hasnt happened because I added a glitch animation effect to every single torch in the game and it caused the game to leak memory like crazy. anyway. check the memory at some point

PIXEL ART

pixel art and tilesets in rpgmaker is hell i have blocked it out. Look it up yourself and struggle along. Using the already existing tilesets as a base was very useful. Or just buy some tilesets online and save yourself time

SKILLS AND GAME BALANCING AND REFERENCES STUFF

heres a few ressources i found useful~

-damage formulas 101

-skills: what you’re doing wrong

-making a balanced game

-how to balance an RPG: or, how to not make your game feel completely broken, unless that's how you want it to feel

-yanfly’s “let’s make a game” comics

-studio zevere’s map design timelapse

-another map design timelapse

-the rpgmaker forums and rpgmaker subreddit have saved my bacon more than once if you get stuck on something! also google, CANNOT praise google enough. just ask google questions.

CREDITING

Credit every ressource that isn’t yours. Can be from icons you found on itchio to plugins to sound effects you found on a website. The standard seems to be credits inside the game (whether as a choice in the menu or at the end), and a credits text file inside your game folder. I personally added each person’s website so if you need ressources just look there lol

EXPORTING THE GAME

dont fucking export as mac don’t do it it’s hell if you have a mac and its actually  impossible to export to mac if you have a pc. I got lucky enough to have a friend who both possessed a mac AND rpgmaker MV. But it still has problems and even some industry ppl told me “lmao you made a mac version I would NEVER” so just save yourself time and don’t export to mac. Exporting to PC is pretty self explanatory

A QUICK EXPLANATION ON SWITCHES AND VARIABLES

Those are very important to make a game and it took me a while to understand so heres a little section about it lol. maybe it’ll help

To take START AGAIN as an example, when you use a crest and the tears disappear, using the crest makes the “Tears1Gone” switch go from OFF to ON. The tears themselves have a second page where if Tears1Gone is ON, then the tears aren’t here anymore.

For variables, they can be anything but i only used them as numbers. So for the barrels, every loop the “BarrelCheck” variable starts at 0, and every time you check a barrel the “BarrelCheck” variable goes up by one. If you check barrels a lot there’s different events, like siffrin thinking that the people of the house must rly like nuts, right? For that, I have a conditional branch that pretty much goes “if BarrelCheck=5, then event is “wow they rly like nuts”“, “if BarrelCheck=12 then another event happens”, “else just the usual dialogue.”

Here’s a tiny bit of how it looks like in practice! The tutorial might explain it better. It took me a little bit to understand how to even use it lol

as for event pages also: REMEMBER PAGE PRIORITY GOES FROM LEFT (least priority) TO RIGHT (the prioritest). So if an event you’ve added doesn’t start it may be because the page order you made is wrong.

THE CREATOR BRAIN ZONE

Making a game is hard. But it can also be extremely fun. But also it’s haaaaaard!!! How do I even make a gaaaaaame!!!

Play games that you love again. Take notes. Notice the very small parts about a game that make it incredibly easier to play. Add that to your game. As an example: i played the great ace attorney as I was making the prologue. AND. did you know the dialogue in ace attorney has a very slight pause at every comma or semi colon, and a longer pause after periods or exclamation points and stuff. Did you notice. Are you losing your goshdarn mind over it now. Well someone made a plugin to reproduce that so go say thanks

also you WILL hate your game at some point. and at that point you gotta push through it and tell yourself “well. if i hate it. maybe i should just. make it better” and add like a cheesy scene about people eating snacks. works every time

anyway in general just analyze why you love/hate video games and add that to your game. just be extremely annoying about it. Like i just LOVE flavor text in games so I added it EVERYWHERE. Did i get worried it was gonna get annoying? Yes. Did a lot of people really like the flavor text anyway? Also yes. Make a game you’d love to play and it might click with people. Also what would be the point of making a game you don’t like to play??? NONE!!! SO BE AS SELF-INDULGENT AS POSSIBLE, GODDAMMIT!!!!!!!

also make a devlog post every two weeks with what you did in the last few days so you can see how far you’ve come later lol