I unintentionally spent 8hrs today just playing around with the base RPG Maker MV software. So much for getting any work on my current project done.

I won't be porting my current project to MV as it would simply be too much that would need to be thrown away in the process and I'm still very much interested in playing around with ruby scripting.

I am a little surprised at how limited the generator parts are compared to the amount of parts that came with the ACE generator. Color options are still limited (what happened to the dark brown hair color?) although probably more than we got with ACE. Some pieces I liked to use from ACE like the eye patches and tattoos are not included and for whatever reason they decided that females can't use the goggle accessory. Why do accessories need to be gender specific anyway? Not one gender neutral accessory to be had. It's also not as straight forward as it used to be in ACE to move parts around. Not hard, just a few more moving parts to be concerned with and I also found out that the moved pieces aren't picked up by the software until you exit the program and reopen it. I believe that in ACE, if you just closed the generator window and reopened it, it would pick up on any changes.

Anyway, those are just minor nitpicks I have. Overall, I do like the improvements like built in side view battle and animated battlers. We actually get damaged sprites, something I'm sorely in need of right now for my current ACE project. We can finally use the mouse to click on things (yeah). The more detailed sprites are just lovely. A lot of things are the same as they've ever been, like event creation. Mapping in the editor is for the most part nothing new. Region IDs are now a layer maybe some other things changed but I didn't mess around with the mapping too much.

I haven't added any plugins yet as I want to play with the base software and see what it does by default before I start changing it. I'm not a big believer in throwing in changes just because they're available. I like to add only what I need to make my game. Since I won't be making a game with MV in the near future I probably won't be too concerned with how the plugins work. On the up side, by the time I get around to it, maybe there will be a lot more useful plugins available and just more resources in general.

I've got a lot more to play around in but for the time being I shall return to my ACE project because I've got a ways to go before that puppy is done but new games will definitely get a turn in MV.