Dev Journal #2 - Making RPG Maker Suck Less (Patreon)

Hey everyone! Thanks to all of the new contributors for helping push the project's total past $500! I think that's quite an achievement for as little as I've shown you guys, but that will definitely change as we get closer to the first release. Once all of the core mechanics are coded for the first release I plan on putting together a little video to show off the project better. Anyways, the topic I'd like to talk about this time is the lovely platform called RPG Maker, how I ended up choosing to start a full project utilizing it, and some of the complications that I've overcome so far to bring it closer to the 21st century. When I started this project I really didn't plan for it to grow to where it has now. I don't think many people start RPG Maker projects thinking they will spend multiple years on them, but so far it's been a pretty solid experience as I've gotten the chance to practice my development skills in Ruby (a completely new language to me). The major catalyst for the project's growth was the art. I personally didn't think I'd be able to create a detailed, unique art style that I'd be happy with while being able to produce large amounts of artwork in a limited time. As the quality of the artwork increased, so did the seriousness of the project. As it turns out, the platform was not such a bad choice after all as it has provided an existing framework and community whose scripting efforts have made mine a thousand times less painful. The areas where this platform suffered severely were of course complexity and visuals, and as the project progressed I felt I wanted to improve upon those areas. The image I've posted is a pretty good reference for some of the visual improvements I've made to the game in the last six months. The most obvious change is the resolution, which has been raised significantly past what you'll see in other RPG Maker games. This alone was easily a two month project (and probably more as the cascade of broken mechanics this created was seemingly never ending), as core classes had to be rewritten to allow for the expanded resolution. This change naturally led to a decrease in performance, but what *really* surprised me was how massive the drop in performance was. As I looked into the matter I quickly became aware of how amazingly unoptimized the engine was, as it was doing things such as rendering sprites and running unnecessary events that weren't even on the screen during the map scene. This of course led to huge issues when I tried making maps of any significant size. These things of course needed to be fixed, and more rewrites to classes involving events, the cache, and rendering ensued. It was probably August by the time I had overhauled the engine to the point that it performed well at a resolution i was relatively pleased with. That being said, it was just a couple of weeks ago that I spent a week further improving upon the way the game handles bitmaps due to large (dimension-wise) images adversely affecting framerate. The struggle will no doubt go on. Since I'm sure the question will come up at some point: I definitely did investigate pushing the resolution higher! I opted not to due to the certain mass hardware casualties that would ensue. As hard as it is to believe processors would be in flames and what not... an ugly sight for sure. This probably has something to do with the nature of Ruby and it being an interpreted (and thus inherently slow) language for making a game with, but I chose not to research it further. The drastic choice to enhance RPG Maker's resolution of course meant I had to re-render all of the graphical content I had created for the game up to that point, but really it was fun to do so as my improved skills with the software meant dramatic improvements to the quality in most areas. So yeah, expect a progress update in the next couple of weeks, and be sure to let me know of some areas of development you'd like to know more about! Until next time!