rpg maker | Through the Shattered Lens

I mentioned back in January that I had purchased RPG Maker VX Ace, and then I never said another word about it. Well, it hasn’t been collecting dust. I decided to take a break from my current game project to make a little combat tutorial I thought might be useful.

RPG Maker is an outstanding product, but it heavily favors the classic Dragon Quest-style RPG. My project has a futuristic cyberpunk setting, so a lot of my options are limited. There are some fantastic sci-fi tile sets out there (I am eternally in debt to Celianna’s Futuristic Tiles–well worth the $19.99), but the non-fantasy battlers selection on the market was still dismal last I checked. With VX Ace’s default combat system out of the picture for me, I had to get a little creative. I’ve been trying to develop increasingly more complex in-map combat sequences, and I thought it would be a fun break to make a little demo of the Region exploitation that’s been empowering it all.

In this video, I employ Regions, Game Data variables, and the Get Location Info function to generate a map in which combat events are triggered by the player’s location in relation to a moving enemy. You might notice I overlooked a few commands in the victory sequence that will prohibit the player from winning while facing down. Simply copy and paste the previous conditional, change the direction fix from up to down, and switch the jump direction from -2 Y to +2 Y.

I noticed this video sometimes ends early for no apparent reason in its embedded form. You can view it at its proper length of 19 minutes directly on youtube if it’s not working here.

I made a peculiar purchase today. I am not typically one to dive in for impulse buying, but I have had a bug in me ever since I played Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim about a year ago. I must admit that by the end of the first decade of this dark century of ours I had completely lost faith in video games. In Blizzard I trust, but the dynamics of an MMORPG are enormously time-consuming as a rule, and in the realm of the single-player there simply weren’t many good options for a long, long time. Suikoden V in 2006 was a breath of fresh air, but as Konami put the nix to the series shortly thereafter I abandoned gaming beyond the Blizzard monolith entirely. It took six years for another game to catch my eye. What I realized while playing Skyrim, aside from the fact that really awesome RPG/adventure games with compelling plots and memorable soundtracks do still exist, is that I am entirely out of touch with gaming in general as it exists today.

I really don’t know what is popular now. I am completely clueless. But I have a sneaking suspicion that what I purchased today is not among your common, mass-marketed fair.

I bought RPG Maker VX Ace. I didn’t plan to. I just stumbled upon it, was shocked that it still exists, and clicked buy. I had last used RPG Maker software at some point back in the 90s, when ASCII was still making it and the best you could do was a fan-translated hack. (Enterbrain makes it now, and I rather doubt companies would still view freely distributed fan hacks as innocent endeavors.) The Dragon Quest JRPG-inspired format of VX Ace, just released in March 2012, might be considered retro at this point, but I have to wonder whether there might not be a serious market demand for that. Wouldn’t it be nice to see some games which, necessarily limited in graphics and sound, had to rely on a compelling plot to the degree of a Final Fantasy VI or a Chrono Trigger? I certainly think so. Not that I possess the capacity to make any myself, but I am beginning to see a vision for my 2013 hobby unfolding: Last year I investigated the history of video game music up until about 1994. If VX Ace holds my interest at least long enough for me to get my $70 worth out of it, I might spend this year looking into the world of indie gaming. If nothing else, I’ll at least make a post or two in the near future showing off my new toy.