Kidd The Maniac

Summon Buffalo Herd + Flaming Whiskey Explosion + Status Effect Harmonica + Dynamite = Awesome.

I think it's because it's supposed to emulate some of the latter FF games like 8 and 9, which don't have windows (at least while the ATB bars are charging).

Several months back, I saw a demo for an RPGMaker release that someone had decided to exhibit publicly at various cons. The stuff he showed overall had a lot of pretty serious issues (lots of his B and D tiles were randomly cut in half, the dialogue was full of awkward info dumps and didn't fit inside the text boxes, many of the events were just plain broken) but the thing that really killed it dead for me was the fact every single character was voiced by someone who didn't know how to use a mic. You know, bad sound quality, tons of hissing and popping, and they were constantly breathing into the microphone. "So, noble night, hhhhhhhh, what is it that you have come to request from me? GgghhhhhhhuuuuuI'll have you know that I will not suffer fools glady and hhhhif you intend to mock me I shall strike theehhhhhhhhhh down." On top of that, I'm just gonna be a huge jerk and say that a lot of amateur voice actors just aren't that great. I'm not saying there aren't any good ones (I've met a few folks who're insanely talented) but a big chunk of amateur VAs are just people who just scream really awkwardly in a stereotypically 'anime' kind of way. ("I'm the quirky girl so my voice is suuuper squeaky and weird, nyah!"/"I am the stoic warrior type and so I talk like I'm bored of living."/ etc.) So, yeah. Sorry for the long (and somewhat jerk-ish) post, but I honestly think that unless you can somehow get ahold of a professional actor, it'd be better to just not have voices in your game. Bad voices can just destroy the tone of your game.

It's an interesting idea. I mean, a good number of RPG fans play the games primarily to enjoy the story, but...I dunno. The idea of a thousand RPGMaker games that all have the exact same battle system, menus, title screens, GUI, weather effects and the like...it sounds like it would be pretty mind-numbing after a while, even with the different stories and worlds people would devise. That said, vis a vis games I'm either planning or currently helping out with, one of them would barely change at all (aside from certain sidequests and mini-games needing to be heavily retooled or removed), and the other one would probably scrap combat altogether, since the default systems really don't fit the mood I want that project to have. Guess that's two very extreme ends of the spectrum, though.

I'm gonna go with estriole on this one, Square Enix is pretty notorious for taking down anything that could be considered copyright inrfringement, regardless of whether it's being sold commercially or not. They're pretty damned serious about protecting their IP. Here's the thing, though, it's not exactly dependent on how big the fanbase for your game might get, at least not directly. It's whether SE notices your use of their music. The fanbase could theoretically be enormous, and as long as no-one at SE finds out you're using their music, your game would continue to be available, at least until someone at SE sees it. On the other end of the spectrum, your game could be tiny and obscure, with maybe five or six people knowing about it; if one of those people happens to work for SE, they'll ask you to remove the music or stop distributing the game. Overall, I'd honestly say it'd be better if you use different music, even without all the legal ramifications. It can be jarring as heck to be playing a fanmade game and suddenly hear a piece from something you've played before. Best example I can think of right now is Desert Nightmare. It's definitely a fun game, but every time they use something from the Silent Hill 2 soundtrack, my mind immediately goes to that game since it's where I originally heard the music. TL;DR: It'd really be better if you used something from the downloadable music packs, or gave your game original music.

Keep in mind, though, you're gonna want to have a finished (or nearly finished) product when you start applying to Greenlight. RPGMaker games tend to be frowned upon (at least, from what I've seen) in Greenlight unless they're either incredibly polished or have a lot of original graphics/music/etc.

Depends what kinda game you're making. If your game is horror-oriented, grab the zombie survival pack. If you want to do a game with a slice-of-life type setting, try one of the DS expansions. Although as a word of warning, take a good look at the screenshots you see in the Steam product pages. A fair few of the DLC packs have art styles that're vastly different from the stuff in Ace's RTP. It can look really awkward in a game having your RTP style characters talking to NPCs whose face portraits are obviously drawn by a different person.

Fire up your favorite image-making program (Paint, Photoshop, whatever), and just create any image whose dimensions are 544x416. Then when you're using the maker, click 'Tools', then 'Database', go to the 'System' tab and set the title screen to whatever image you created.

Want to give the player a hint that some objects contain hidden items? Do something similar to what Pokemon Red/Blue did and put a hidden item in the very first room of the game (in this case, the spare potion in your PC). I love searching for items regardless of whether there's a little sparkle or exclamation mark. I just reflexively check stuff, so I'd be totally fine playing a game where some buckets/bookcases/etc have items in them. That said, I'm gonna hold up Blue Dragon as a great example of what not to do vis a vis hidden items. 1. Almost every single inch of the game can be examined, even parts that just look like blank walls. (There's actually an achievement for examining every empty space) 2. Players essentially have to spam the examine button constantly in order to pick up every hidden item. 3. Hitting said button in proximity to an itemless area causes the game to make an annoying "Nothing" voice play. Combine two and three and you get a game where you spend the majority of your non-battle game time hammering the action button and hearing "Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing" looped over and over again. So...yeah. Hidden items are fine with me, just try not to make the "nothing here" message too long or have an annoying sound effect.

I'm gonna do my best to play around with variables and see if there is indeed a way to check which actor is using a specific move or item, but for now I've managed to come up with two "chewing gum and scotch tape" solutions, both of which would require you to create a common event in which a character's portrait is temporarily altered (then remember to switch it off as part of your victory conditions). The first thing I can think of is to split this skill into three (or however many) different versions of the skill, all with the same name but with different database entries and different effects. (eg. Eric's 'Metamorphasis' might be set at skill 54 and change his portrait and sprite, whereas Natalie's might be listed as skill 56 and affect only her, etc.) A second suggestion would be to use Yanfly's Ace Menu Engine, and edit the script in order to remove the 'Formation' command, then set the variable to the party member number. (So Eric is always Party Member 1, therefore if the engine sees that Party Member 1 is using said skill, it will always affect Eric). Of course, this wouldn't really work if either your game has a lot of party members, or if altering a party's formation is an important aspect of your game's gameplay. Anyway, I'm going to play around some and see if I can come up with a more efficient solution for you. Both of these suggestions are pretty flawed, so hopefully someone around here could provide some more elegant and efficient alternatives.

Sounds like an interesting idea; kind of reminds me of ImScared.exe. And yeah, I wouldn't make it so that exiting the game was absolutely impossible, just in case whoever's playing it is either genuinely disturbed by your game or the kind of person who gets mad at not being allowed to shut a program down.

I have a feeling he's referring to a sprite generator like looseleaf, but to be honest I'm not sure as to the terms of use for that particular tool, so it might be best not to use it for a commercial game.

If you just want your NPC to move around randomly (ie you don't need them to be walking to and from a specific location) then it's probably easier for you to just go under the Autonomous Movement heading on the left and change it from 'Custom' to 'Random', rather than using the 'Set Move Route' option. The most likely reason your NPC disappears when you try and talk to it is because your second page event doesn't have a graphic attached to it. When you switch to page 2, is there still a sprite in the little graphic box on the left? As for it 'not moving', do you mean that the NPC stops moving when you talk to it, or that you can't move away from the NPC after you've spoken to them? (If it's the latter, changing the Autonomous Movement setting to random and removing your move route commands should hopefully do the trick as you might be stuck in a repeat loop as things are)

Alright, here's what I managed to come up with today: (The side sprites still need some shading, and their chest areas could definitely use some work, plus I need to finish outlining their faces.) My current crack at it's ended up a wee bit bulkier than how you suggested, but I actually kinda like the look. As for the arms and legs, I looked at a lot of different sprite templates out there and I found that I really liked the ones with a somewhat more 'aggressive' stance, so I decided to try my hand at something similar. There's actually a lot about this sprite that I thought "Eh, I wanna do it different" (like the face outline), and in most cases, I ended up learning why it would've been a better idea to do it more like your example. So, yeah, I'm still messing up a lot, but at least it's helping me figure out a few things. Hopefully sometime tomorrow I can post a revised version of this turnaround with better shading, some reshaping, and a few other tweaks. And when I'm finally satisfied, I can move onto animation, woo! (Although TBH I might spend a few days dressing her up as a quick break before I take on that particular area.)

Thanks, everyone. @Jane: Corpse Party's actually a pretty interesting one to look into, if you're interested in reading about all the backstory stuff. The very first version was made on Tsukuru Dante 98 II (an old Japanese version of RPGMaker for 16bit computers) by a single guy in 1996. A lot of the characters we know (like the teacher, the glasses dude, the exchange student and even Seiko) weren't present, there were no voices, and the art for it's kinda sketchy by today's standards, but it won some pretty big name indie game awards at the time. Then in 2006, the game was remade for cell phones, the PC and PSP with all the new characters and art that we love. As you can probably imagine, the old version's a lot closer to the kinds of stuff we budding developers make, and if you're interested in seeing what that looks like, there's actually an XP remake out there that's been translated into English by some industrious fans.(Not sure if I'm allowed to link it, though)