Trying out RPG Maker MV (Patreon)

Disclaimer: This is a really long post, so if you want to skip me talking about the issues I’ve had with Twine, look for the bold text halfway down. If you want to skip even further, you can go down to the bullet points on the pros and cons of switching to RPG Maker. I’ve included a demo you can download to try and see some of the differences, though a lot of my motivation for the switch is how it will make development easier for me. (Which should increase the rate at which content is produced for all of you.)

So, after the dreadful time I had fixing bugs and double-checking things on the latest update, I wanted to try and find a solution. I’ve been able to make twine do essentially everything I’ve wanted it to do so far code-wise, but I’ve found some issues with Twine’s interface itself. Twine provides a useful interface that lets you view the different passages in a game and see how they link to one another, but when you have over a thousand passages in total, and twine has to draw all of the links between all of these passages, things start to slow down. And by slow down, I mean, take several seconds to generate or move a passage.

There’s a way around this that still lets you use twine’s interface, that I’ve been using for a bit now. By splitting Crossdressing in Camelot into different “stories,” as twine calls them, I can avoid the lag that occurs. The downside is when things interact between these different parts, as that means I have to publish the individual parts, and then compile them together, before I can test it. That’s where a lot of time ends up getting wasted, in this particular update, it was the church. I don’t have to test everything by compiling the game together first, but for the stuff that does require that, whenever I find an issue and fix it, I then have to go back and make sure the individual story-chunks are likewise updated, and then when I’ve changed several things, I like to recompile the story to ensure I caught all the original bugs, which means I have to run through things for the nth time to make sure there aren’t any problems.

So, a solution I thought of, was to see if Crossdressing in Camelot would be better served by the RPG Maker engine. I originally went with twine because of the freedom. While it is almost certainly not the best thing to work with when building a game from scratch, it was easy to get into, and I never found myself faced with something that simply could not be done in twine. RPG Maker is also fairly easy to get into, but it lacked the same level of freedom, or maybe it’s just the way you are given certain tools off the bat. I think the reason why many RPG Maker games feel the same is because of that. When you go into it fresh without having worked on a game before, you see what the basics of RPG Maker can do and stick with that. But with twine, I was building things up from scratch more or less, so I did what I thought would be interesting, not what the engine made easy to do. I don’t think my first instinct would have been to create a combo-ing element system if I had started with RPG Maker, but I’m rather fond of that system, and the amount of thought it adds to the game. It’s not just “you have 4 elements, they all do the same thing except some do more damage to certain enemies.” But going into it knowing that I wanted to replicate the systems present in Crossdressing in Camelot, it was actually pretty simple to set up with the help of plug-ins.

Semi-Rant ends here!

So, this post is basically an experiment, to see if you all think Crossdressing in Camelot would benefit from being ported over to RPG Maker. Or, honestly, if you didn’t have any preference, that would be good enough with me as well, because I think once I do move everything over, using RPG Maker will make developing and especially playtesting immeasurably easier to do.

I’ve spent about a week or so learning how RPG Maker works, and I’ve managed to port over the first little bit of the game into RPG Maker. Most of my time was spent setting up the combat system and figuring things out, actually porting things over is pretty damn simple, just a bunch of copy and pasting text for the most part. Managing variables is also a hell of a lot easier, and I don’t have to worry about missing a < in my code and having it break an entire page, or anything like that.

This little demo is very barebones at the moment. It has part of the intro to the game set up, but most of my work went into the Lizardman section of it. It now has its own little forest area set up for it, and I think it shows off a bit of how Crossdressing in Camelot might improve by being moved to RPG Maker. I didn’t want to spend any money on this until I’m sure I want to go forward with it, and I had the bad timing to start using RPG Maker MV right after one of the biggest collection of plug-ins was put behind a $30 paywall, so I am confident several things in it could be improved quite a bit.

There are a lot of features that you might assume are default RPG maker content, like text speed, hp bars for enemies, ect., but a lot of those are actually plug-ins, so if I bought the pack of plug-ins, I would be able to do a lot of quality of life enhancements.

I’ve also played a lot of RPG Maker (porn) games myself, so I have a pretty good idea of the common issues plaguing these kinds of games and will do my best to avoid them. Some of these issues require the plug-ins I don’t have access to yet, so the ability to change text speed and combat animation speed isn’t in yet. RPG Maker’s default system for random encounters also kind of sucks, as a 100-step random encounter rate means you could fight an enemy in 2 steps, or 200. I also want to specify that this isn’t going to turn Crossdressing in Camelot into a grind fest, because I feel way too many RPG Maker games end up going that route, and suffer for it.

Here’s a quick overview of the pros and cons of RPG Maker, as compared to Twine, in my opinion.

Pros:

· Improves combat, and dungeon experiences in general. (The dungeons will not make you fight monsters every 3 seconds, I promise.) The current dungeons in twine work, but since you have to go to a new passage every click, going off on side passages can be time consuming. Thus, I’ve felt the need to have full little events in basically every passage. This isn’t to say that I’ll reduce the number of events in dungeons, but in RPG Maker, I could add in little side passages and secrets that just give you a bit of gold, or an item, or something, without feeling like a disappointing waste of time.

· Makes creating “new” stuff a lot easier. Whenever I want to do something new code-wise in Twine, I need to code everything for that myself, which often means quite a bit of testing to ensure it all works. RPG Maker has more content available out the gate, and a massive library of plug-ins to get even more involved in the mechanics of the game.

· Reduces time required to playtest. Variables in RPG Maker can be referenced by you picking them out of a list of all your variables, as opposed to me simply typing in said variable. This means there’s no risk of me misspelling variables, and generally makes them easier to keep track of. This also circumvents the need to split the story into multiple chunks, which is a huge plus.

· Images generally work better in RPG Maker. Especially during events, instead of just plopping them into the middle of a wall of text, they can be front and center and remain on your screen while reading text. Doing full sex scene images presents a lot of difficulty with the varying appearance of the player’s character, but many scenes could be drawn from the players perspective, like the Lizardman defeat scenes.

· Player images. It’s not the best for body changes, but the demo already has a basic character creator, and if I spent time on it, I’m sure I could find a bunch of other resources for player customization. I also think having a framework to go off of would make it easier for me to add in clothes and that sort of customization.

· Appearance. RPG Maker games can look pretty bad, but if I did switch over, I’d do my best to ensure Crossdressing in Camelot actually looks good in the engine. The forest is a good example of this. I didn’t want to spend too much time off the bat looking at sprites and decorations, but I think it looks pretty damn good regardless. Also, basic though it is, just by changing a rug in RPG Maker from red to purple, I think Beatrice’s shop already has a decently unique look to it.

Cons:

· Conversion time. I believe I’d be able to port the game over in about a month. I would start by putting things in without a lot of extra visual effects. Locations like the Sorcerer’s Cauldron will pretty much just be a place for you to talk to Beatrice in, with little to no animations and basic interiors. That lets me get things to at least the level they were at in Twine, and then from there I can see how long that took, and decide if I want to work on improving the appearance of things already in the game or focus on additional content. Since I’ve already spent a bit of time on this, I’ll be pausing next months payment regardless, as I wouldn’t be able to put out a good amount of content even if I went right back to twine now. I’ve also had a bit less time to work recently, so I would have put payments on hold regardless.

· Text space. This is probably the biggest downside to using RPG Maker, it doesn’t hold as much text on the screen as twine does. I’ve already mitigated this by increasing the default resolution, which means you won’t have to press z every 8 words, but it is a downside nonetheless. I’ll definitely be looking for a way to have text auto progress after a certain amount of time, just in case both of your hands are occupied for whatever reason.

· JavaScript. I don’t know how to code in Java, so if I find something I want to do that there isn’t a plugin for, it might take me a bit to figure out how to do so. I don’t think it will be incredibly hard to pick up on though, especially since I probably wouldn’t be looking to do anything crazy in the code itself.

So yeah, that’s the end of my very long post about this. I think it will be great for the long-term health of the game, and I already think the Lizardman area is much more interesting, but what do you think? Especially if you’ve played a bunch of RPG Maker games like I have, and have started to hate them, please try out the demo and see if I’ve done a decent job of avoiding the pitfalls typical in these games. (Excluding the things I need to buy plug-ins for, of course.) If I did go ahead and work to move things over, I wouldn’t charge for time spent just on moving things over, as that doesn’t really result in much new content for all of you.

Either way, since I’ve spent time on making this demo, and because I’m on a bit of a vacation, I’m not charging for January.

Here is the demo for the Windows version of the game: https://mega.nz/#!xeAjjKib!womTScSQYb3yiGB9Q9YtZ-wgyAOM7ujAuy1jGO_d2bE

And here is the Mac version: https://mega.nz/#!taYXiKLZ!Vfc2SmMm5XI_TOCWGw6hFuBAipsEtwCzmhthLOTDLbs

And a Linux version: https://mega.nz/#!UGQGgAra!rxyvllMch1BH6-eQkvo9Xuam72OaOJQVvvHtS7TPNq0

I wanted to spend a bit more time polishing it up, but I also don't want to spend too much time on a demo, so I'm releasing it as is. I also think having those plugins will speed things up a bit as well, once I figure out how to use all of them.