I'm curious to see what people think a good and balanced RPG Maker would be. If you had your way, what would the next upcoming RPG Maker(for example, our 4th installment) be like?
Basically, I'd like to see RPG Maker 2, with a few improvements.
HELP
-There's always gonna be people who have no clue on doing even the simplest of things, even if they had their hands held. So, I thought about a simple tutorial. Not a full-on help guide, but a simple "point and do" interface, where the player is led through a few steps to create any aspect of the game, and then they're left to their own devices. Or, a help video on a DVD would be sweet. Probably not possible though.
-Another possibility would be a creation wizard. When you start off on beginner, normal etc., you'll be asked questions as to how much preset data you want, what kinds of preset scripts you want etc.
GRAPHICS
-There should be a certain degree of graphical quality all across the board. All models in the game should be interchangeable for the field and battle. Like for example, a dragon could be used as an enemy or a party member. I don't think an insect in battle should look like nothing or a sparkle on the field, it should look like an insect. This would also put more diversity in the enemies used in a CBS.
-A simple increase in models. 140 would be a good number for models that could be used as characters or enemies. 50 human models, 50 animal models, and 40 misc. models like treants, insects and that sort of thing.
-A character model part editor would be cool. One idea that might not be pushing it, would be to have every entity have 3 parts to manipulate: a head, torso and legs and then you could stretch out those parts. Everyone could have their own unique proportions.
-All the "special" motions in the game should be usable for ANY character. I wanted to make a beat 'em up or a shooter, but few characters can actually shoot, punch or kick.
-The drawing distance in RPG Maker 2's world maps were bad. I don't want to see miles ahead to the other side of the world, but an extra 8-10 tiles of drawn world around would be great.
SOUNDS
-Having over 200 SFX was pretty good in RPG Maker 2, see no reason to change it, except maybe add a few more instrumental sounds like electric guitars or something.
-A bigger BGM selection, like 75 would be nice. While I do want a bigger selection of music, I'm not a novice as I make my own a lot.
FUNCTIONALITY
-Bring back creation time logs! It was fun seeing how many hours of our lives we wasted on our creations.
-The game should keep track of what memory card slot the game was saved on, AND what game slot it was saved to. This eliminates mistaken overwrites.
-Action scripts should run REGARDLESS OF WHAT ELSE IS GOING ON. I don't want to see NPCs stopping because I talked to someone. Also, music and VFX scripts would run better. I also hate having candles supposedly die out because I wanted to examine a book. It'd also make homemade game clocks MUCH more accurate.
-The difficulty thing should be abolished, or be made to actually mean something.
-Multiple choice pages with "page scrolling". This would allow us to have more choices in one command, with the scrolling capabilities RPG Maker 2's class info window had. 24 choices(8 per page, up to 3 pages) would be great.
-RPG Maker 2's editor functions worked better using easy mode. For those of you who didn't know, easy mode allowed you to use a menu based system to use functions that required complex control schemes in the harder modes. This would get rid of the difficult control scheme and eliminate most of the help messages. Having a few control based functions would be good, but overall the editors could've done better with menus.
-Quick Menu commands. The DMS is pretty good, but a lot of people want to make their own CMSs. Unfortunately, we have to do without a lot of options, like text display speed. I think that every selection in the DMS should be available using a command. For example, to go the equip menu without using the DMS, you'd just insert a Quick Menu:Equip command in a script. This would make CMSs a lot easier to make and more versatile.
-Inventories. Users should have the choice of using the DW style system, or a bag only system. And about the bag....the freaking option to have it toggleable should be there!
-The option to "clear" any part of a field in the editors. For example, having to delete a whole list of items for a character and then do the whole list again is frustrating. The ability to delete/copy/paste would've made the process a lot easier.
-Images. These things are under-utilized. They need to be re-sizable(to consume less memory) and movable. The game would detect these images from the USB ports in the PS2/3 to be imported, instead of importing from a camera that might not even work.
-Detecting button input. We should be able to detect constant holding of a button, as well as multiple button presses. Pressure detection would be crazy, but awesome.
-Text box options(with the ability to customize each of the 10 or so text boxes, although I'd like an increase):
These text box options plus the above ones would allow us to make a true custom menu interface...without having to learn RGSS, or even get our own resources. Cool huh?
I'm very proficient with RPG Maker 2, so I wanted to make sure any suggestion wasn't something that already could be done in the game. No offense to anyone, but I wanted to make this topic because I see a lot of people complaining about the RPG Maker games, and I wanted to see who could put actually their money where their mouth was and make helpful suggestions. And who knows, this topic may go into the suggestions box for RPG Maker 4!
Basically, I'd like to see RPG Maker 2, with a few improvements.
HELP
-There's always gonna be people who have no clue on doing even the simplest of things, even if they had their hands held. So, I thought about a simple tutorial. Not a full-on help guide, but a simple "point and do" interface, where the player is led through a few steps to create any aspect of the game, and then they're left to their own devices. Or, a help video on a DVD would be sweet. Probably not possible though.
-Another possibility would be a creation wizard. When you start off on beginner, normal etc., you'll be asked questions as to how much preset data you want, what kinds of preset scripts you want etc.
GRAPHICS
-There should be a certain degree of graphical quality all across the board. All models in the game should be interchangeable for the field and battle. Like for example, a dragon could be used as an enemy or a party member. I don't think an insect in battle should look like nothing or a sparkle on the field, it should look like an insect. This would also put more diversity in the enemies used in a CBS.
-A simple increase in models. 140 would be a good number for models that could be used as characters or enemies. 50 human models, 50 animal models, and 40 misc. models like treants, insects and that sort of thing.
-A character model part editor would be cool. One idea that might not be pushing it, would be to have every entity have 3 parts to manipulate: a head, torso and legs and then you could stretch out those parts. Everyone could have their own unique proportions.
-All the "special" motions in the game should be usable for ANY character. I wanted to make a beat 'em up or a shooter, but few characters can actually shoot, punch or kick.
-The drawing distance in RPG Maker 2's world maps were bad. I don't want to see miles ahead to the other side of the world, but an extra 8-10 tiles of drawn world around would be great.
SOUNDS
-Having over 200 SFX was pretty good in RPG Maker 2, see no reason to change it, except maybe add a few more instrumental sounds like electric guitars or something.
-A bigger BGM selection, like 75 would be nice. While I do want a bigger selection of music, I'm not a novice as I make my own a lot.
FUNCTIONALITY
-Bring back creation time logs! It was fun seeing how many hours of our lives we wasted on our creations.
-The game should keep track of what memory card slot the game was saved on, AND what game slot it was saved to. This eliminates mistaken overwrites.
-Action scripts should run REGARDLESS OF WHAT ELSE IS GOING ON. I don't want to see NPCs stopping because I talked to someone. Also, music and VFX scripts would run better. I also hate having candles supposedly die out because I wanted to examine a book. It'd also make homemade game clocks MUCH more accurate.
-The difficulty thing should be abolished, or be made to actually mean something.
-Multiple choice pages with "page scrolling". This would allow us to have more choices in one command, with the scrolling capabilities RPG Maker 2's class info window had. 24 choices(8 per page, up to 3 pages) would be great.
-RPG Maker 2's editor functions worked better using easy mode. For those of you who didn't know, easy mode allowed you to use a menu based system to use functions that required complex control schemes in the harder modes. This would get rid of the difficult control scheme and eliminate most of the help messages. Having a few control based functions would be good, but overall the editors could've done better with menus.
-Quick Menu commands. The DMS is pretty good, but a lot of people want to make their own CMSs. Unfortunately, we have to do without a lot of options, like text display speed. I think that every selection in the DMS should be available using a command. For example, to go the equip menu without using the DMS, you'd just insert a Quick Menu:Equip command in a script. This would make CMSs a lot easier to make and more versatile.
-Inventories. Users should have the choice of using the DW style system, or a bag only system. And about the bag....the freaking option to have it toggleable should be there!
-The option to "clear" any part of a field in the editors. For example, having to delete a whole list of items for a character and then do the whole list again is frustrating. The ability to delete/copy/paste would've made the process a lot easier.
-Images. These things are under-utilized. They need to be re-sizable(to consume less memory) and movable. The game would detect these images from the USB ports in the PS2/3 to be imported, instead of importing from a camera that might not even work.
-Detecting button input. We should be able to detect constant holding of a button, as well as multiple button presses. Pressure detection would be crazy, but awesome.
-Text box options(with the ability to customize each of the 10 or so text boxes, although I'd like an increase):
- Transparency. That way we could have messages appear wherever, without borders getting in the way.
- Variables, inputs and item descriptions should be able to be displayed in a text box.
- The ability to recolor them.
These text box options plus the above ones would allow us to make a true custom menu interface...without having to learn RGSS, or even get our own resources. Cool huh?
I'm very proficient with RPG Maker 2, so I wanted to make sure any suggestion wasn't something that already could be done in the game. No offense to anyone, but I wanted to make this topic because I see a lot of people complaining about the RPG Maker games, and I wanted to see who could put actually their money where their mouth was and make helpful suggestions. And who knows, this topic may go into the suggestions box for RPG Maker 4!
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