Some (possibly dumb) questions

[Saintphillip]

Hey guys, I'm in a bit of a dilemma and am now looking around for a solution and have ended up here- Where hopefully one of you fine people can help me.

I am not a programmer, I am actually a writer and approx a year and a half ago I decided to try my hand at making the game ive always dreamed of- A story rich , turn based rpg with a western style and mature theme. Obviously, RPG maker was the perfect choice since the engine did everything I needed more or less and there were scripts available to do what it could not. I purchased Unity assets of monsters and took screenshots of them posed in unity , used Fuse to make main character portraits and then cut them out and photoshopped them to add them into my game as 2d images. I made maps in photoshop and have put a ton of work into this game- It looks nothing like an RPG maker game.

I did all of this work and planned on paying an artist to do the spritework I needed once I was far enough along in the process- Well, I hit that point recently where I was ready to shell out some money and found out sadly that there are limitations in the RPG maker engine which will require massive scripting changes (and possibly massive bugs and compatibility issues with the work ive already done) in order to have the sprites not look like cartoons and be as detailed as I want them.

I probably should have checked that out before I started but I really thought that with everything I was able to change and do myself that sprites would be the easy part and it would be 'plug and play'- Everything else was quite easy lol...I guess live and learn.

So my dilemma now is that I have over a year of work (part time) and the only way I will be able to really finish it is to use 'tokens' instead of sprites for my characters and monsters- Not a big deal but also not what I had envisioned and for lack of better term it just feels...Ghetto .

So now I'm considering ditching RPG Maker altogether and either salvaging what I can or redoing what I must in a better engine with more versatility. I'm looking at this and I'm looking at unity with 2d plug ins .

So first off- I have parallax maps ive already done that are highly detailed. In RPG Maker I can use a grid to mark "go" and "no go" areas, set random encounters, add switches etc- Will this be similar? Will I have to redo all my maps? How easy is this to use in comparison with something like RPG maker?
Ive looked at the marketplace and graphically it looks like the sprites I will want will easily work here but theres really no point if this is going to end up being impossible for me to use the software-

I know theres a free trial (which I plan to try when I have time) but I'm hoping someone familiar with RPG Maker can explain to me what my issues would be trying to convert my project (all the assets I use are either original or things I purchased in unity and screenshotted to make them 2d) and what type of learning curve Im going to have here with very little programming knowledge.

Maybe dumb questions, this may be out of my league (in which case I can just go the ghetto route and use token and keep my project with rpg maker) in which case its all good.

Thanks

edit- Also if I were to end up choosing to purchase this is there an advantage to doing it through Steam or better to go direct? Thanks again

 

[PogoP]

I'm fairly new to Game Maker Studio, but I used RPG Maker loads in my teens... From my own experience of learning GMS so far, it's definitely a lot more scripting/coding heavy. RPG Maker, out of the box, is very friendly to a newcomer and has a lot of functionality built in (or, it used to, anyway!) to quickly build up a game. With GMS, you will have to build out a lot of functionality before you even have the semblance of a game.

However, there is a ton of information, tutorials and useful posts on here, and on Reddit, and you can easily just google the answers and most of the time you can find the answer to a problem you may be having. If not, you can post up here to get help; everyone is really friendly. But yeah, you will have to learn more about scripting in the GMS language called 'GML'. It's a lot more forgiving than C# in Unity - I wouldn't recommend Unity if you're new to programming.

Hope that helps...

 

[Binsk]

GameMaker will be significantly more complicated than RPG Maker, at least by default. RPG Maker is specially designed to create a very specific style of RPG. GameMaker is designed to create any kind of 2D game. As such, things like basic movement, collisions, battle logic, etc. will need to be designed by you from scratch. None of that is implemented for you.

Now, it is true that you can probably get a lot of this done for you from the marketplace for relatively cheap. In fact, I believe the Yoyo team even has an RPG package (for the out-of-battle stuff Looks like it has real-time battle support but no FinalFantasy style turn-based) for sale which may simplify things. Assuming you get all the game logic implemented one way or another then placement for the levels should be very loosely similar to RPG Maker. GameMaker has layers (which you can add or remove in the room / "level" editor, as many or few as you'd like) and you can just place the GameMaker instances on whichever layer you like (much like in RPG Maker). Auto-tiling is also now a thing in GMS2, so even that is taken care of for you.

GameMaker is more than capable of making any kind of RPG game you want, but it will take a lot of heavy lifting to do (in comparison to RPG Maker) and I think that handling a lot of things (like initiating a battle and such) will be significantly different than you are expecting.

All this said, I think you would be able to pull it off. You seem quite dedicated to the project and there are lots of people here, myself included, who are willing to help you out if you come across any programming questions and whatnot.