ElCodes

Hey guys, as some of you may know I've been working pretty darn hard on creating a Unity asset that recreates the RPG Maker workflow in Unity. Last week, Gotcha Gotcha Games announced they would be releasing RPG Maker Unite... and RPG Maker for Unity... later this year. This was kind of a blow for my project, and it was disheartening after spending a year trying to generate interest in the project, only to see everyone get really excited over Unite... but on the other hand, it confirmed my suspicions this is something people wanted, AND Gotcha Gotcha Games have given me the perfect hashtag to help market my project. Silver linings and all that. Rather than give up and let my work go to waste, I've decided to still complete my project. The difference now however is, instead of requiring a Patron subscription, I think I'm just going to release it for free as a middle finger to Gotcha Gotcha Games. Also, to try and help get UR-RPG out the door ASAP and in attempt to steal some of that Unite thunder, I'm looking for one or maybe two Unity-familiar devs. Currently, I'd say the project is about 70-80% complete. All the core tools are now done, including the database, map editor and visual script editor. For the last couple of weeks, I've been working on a code base to handle runtime, which takes all the info from these tools and creates a buildable Unity game, without the user having to do any code. Cleaning up the code and finishing the runtime side of things is where the remaining work is, however with that said I've already done a lot of work on this too. I already have an audio manager, scene manager, map manager, collision detection, sprite layering, player controller, NPC controller, input manger and more already done. The basic system is in place, only requiring it to be flushed out and made more feature complete. The majority of the work left is just code clean up and on the Event system. This system will iterate through each node in a created Visual Script, and then action each node at runtime. (Show message, shake screen) etc. YOU DON'T NEED TO BE A MASTER DEVELOPER. *Most* of the harder coding is already done. Anyway, for more info DM me. If you know anyone who works with Unity that may be interested, please let them know. Thanks as always guys.

I moved over from RPG Maker to Unity a few years back, but, I've always missed the simplicity of RPG Maker and always wanted an all-in-one system that would turn Unity into something like RPG Maker. There are plenty of RPG makers for Unity, for sure, but none that would handle everything. I decided to use my time in lockdown productivity and worked on a prototype for a game idea I have. I wanted to make some custom Unity windows to help speed things up. I created a side project and experimented. Before long, I had a working database. I also needed a map editor, so I created that next and after I had those two tools, I realized I basically had the RPG Maker-like system I always wanted. I just needed something to handle Events. So... I created my own visual scripting tool. However, since going back to work I've had very little time to work on the project. Details and Features: Still a lot of work needs to be done. I need to finish off the 3 core tools then need to code the runtime engine so it actually uses the data to create a game. I'm thinking of getting a basic runtime engine up and running so I can do a complete start-to-finish demo, or I may just finish off the tools and demo them one by one as development continues. To help speed up development I've created a Kickstarter to help fund a year of full-time development, which should be all I need. However so far it's not gone very well and I'm not hopeful that it's going to get successfully funded so currently working on a Plan B roadmap. If anyone could help spread worth of mouth by posting about the project on any other forums, social media or Discords they're on that would be a mahoosive help. Personally, I'm kind of out of the loop with the RPG Maker community and so far have only posted here. I tried to join some Facebook groups and got in trouble for self promotion... I've tried spending money on advertising, but that hasn't reaped the attention I wanted. I've had 250,000 people look at my website with no one going through to the Kickstarter page... The marketing plan I had has kind of failed so I need to target people that would specifically be interested in this project. Regardless of whether or not I can get the Kickstarter funded, I do plan to continue development but it's just going to take much... much longer as I work it around my full time job. If I can gain enough interest, I will start a Discord server and will be adding a developer blog to the website at some point. If anyone has any questions on UR-RPG or the project in general feel free to DM me here, or on Twitter. Also, for more info check out my website: https://primepixelgames.com/ultimate-retro-rpg/

In preparation for next weeks Runtime demo, I created a rough edit for an into. Check it out here:

Sorry mate, think I misunderstood you on this. The first RPG Maker I used was XP and never used 2003... but I do remember the square... Just couldn't remember what it did. I've done a bit of research and I think you mean ceiling tiles? Currently, I haven't got anything in place for ceiling tiles. I might be able to add them though... I'd just need to see a video or something of them in action to figure out how they work.

OK, so I'm at the point where I want to write a blurb for my game's story, but also not give anything away. Obviously it needs to hook people, but the problem is while the game starts off pretty cookie cutter, it soon escalates and I can't talk about any of it without spoiling. This leaves me with the only option being to try and sell the game on the back story... but I don't think the back story sounds all that interesting. I could hint at what will happen, but give the wrong hint and people may start guessing the plot. This is just a draft. It's rough AF and basically me word scribbling out the basic back story. It covers right up to a moment in the game where you finish the tutorials and the 3 main characters all meet for the first time. Right now, all I need to know is; Does this, on it's own, sound interesting to you? Would you like to hear more on how the story would develop? What are your guesses for what will happen in the game, based on this blurb? I think a very good way of describing shorthand would be 'Final Fantasy + Game of Thrones = Of Gods and Illusions'...

Thanks for the feedback guys. I'm going to take another stab at it when I get the time. Also, I see 'exactly like the beginning of a Final Fantasy story.' as the highest of compliments. lol

RUNTIME UPDATE: No screenshots to share this week, because honestly... there's isn't a real lot to show off. Everything I have done this week has been behind the scene stuff, which doesn't make for very interesting presentation material... Because I'm now working on the Runtime code, I'm having to be a lot more careful with how I write my code. I want this code to be as Scripter Friendly as possible and offer as much customability as I can but still keep control over how the game logic is handled. I'll go into more detail on that in a bit, but right now my point is it's taking slightly longer to write this code, because I'm having to put a lot of consideration into, 'Could someone else easily use this?'. On top of that, as already mentioned, a lot of this stuff is background grunt work that's honestly... kinda boring. I've rewritten this paragraph 3 times now, and I keep failing at making it sound interesting. So here's just a list of stuff I did since last update: Today I finished how UR-RPG handles logic flow, planning out a system that someone could easily later plug their own functionality in to. It will also remember the last active scene, so say you want to place something over the Map Scene, you just stack them up and when closed, whatever is underneath becomes active again. I've created a custom animation system, which if a scripter wants to use to play their own animation, all they have to do is set it's frames and say if it's looped or not. I've created an Input Manager, that can be fully customized. The Input Manager monitors input, and will fire off different events depending on if a button was tapped or held, meaning scripters just have to subscribe to the button inputs they are interested in (i.e. just up and down, confirm and cancel). It will also soon detect double taps and Street-Fighter motions... just for funzies. Mainly because I'm pretty sure I could easily add a double tap and I would like to tackle the Street Fighter inputs... I've created the audio manager to handle all audio. Nothing fancy here, give it a path to an audio file and it'll play it. A simple Transition System. For scripters, you get a reference to the Transition GameObject, and then say what transition you want. I.E. transition.FadeFromBlack(). Scripters can also add their own transitions. A Character Controller. This one was a lot fun. Character Controllers will be used by Events to give the Event a sprite. They can be as simple as a single animation on loop, or a chest with it's open animation. If it's an NPC you pick a character and it automatically creates the walk animations. There's a lot more work to be done here, but right now it has the functionality to store 1-4 animations, turn in 4 directions and move in 4 directions. It can also take a array of numbers so 2,3,0,0,1. Each number corresponds to a direction 0 = down, 1 = left and so on. Obviously this is more for when you want to program a movement pattern for an NPC, but I do plan on also adding A* path finding and random roaming. For now, and I know it's stupid and not really impressive, but I got such a kick out of just having 2 NPCs on the screen doing my bidding and repeating the same steps again and again! A Player Controller. This one wasn't fun. I took the Character Controller, added a bool (true/false value) to state if it's playable, and said if it is playable, well then when you get this input, do this function. Not very exciting, but hey, easy PlayerController. Also, this isn't a new feature, but I have spent a considerable amount of time this week fixing a bug where the map loads blank tiles when coming out of play mode... meaning the user had to restart the Map Editor to be able to use it again. On top of that... Because the map is blank, and the map editor saves the current map on close... so it always overrides whatever the first map is into all blank tiles... but whatever.. it's fixed now. I don't know if this is good progress or not, but it sure felt like a lot of darn work... I just have nothing to show for it! lol! Hopefully though can see the thought and future planning I'm putting into this side of the project... so bare with me on the updates for a while. Tomorrow I'm starting the MapManager. This will handle what map should currently be displayed while also handling collision detection and anything like that. A lot of this code I already have in the Editor side of things, I just need to add a few extra functions... so I'm hoping this will only take a day. Then at the weekend, I want to create the Camera Controller. Once I have these two final pieces in place, UR-RPG will be able to boot into a Boot Scene, which will take you to a Title Screen, then to a Map Scene. I'll be able to load up a map, and walk around with proper layering and collision! At this point I'll film a video so you guys can actually see all this in action. It's kinda funny to think I've spent months working on this. Nearly half a year... I've wrote over 25k lines of code so far and I'm getting excited because I'm about to release a demo where... ALL YOU DO IS BLOODY WALK AROUND! lol. But hey, we're getting there slowly... ROADMAP OK, just in case I don't get a chance to post for a while because I'm eyeball deep in the IDE, once I've done the little demo, I'm then going to start coding out the individual scenes. UR-RPG uses a State Machine to control logic flow, so people can create thire own scenes and add that functionality to game. But all the standard scenes will also be exposed scripts that you can customize. The Window scene, the Battle Scene, The Menu Scene and so on. Keeping in mind, I want make this code easy for others to come in and further customize themselves. For this reason, it may take a few weeks to create all the helper functions I'm going to need create that will make scripting a scene easier. Such as displaying and layering images and text, adding selection lists and things like that. Using these helper functions, I'll create the Scene scripts and start putting together the default menu, shops and battle systems. By the end of the month, I want to be looking at starting to wire up the Visual Event Editor system. I'll start with the first option which is simply ShowMessage. Once that's working it'll be a matter just coding what to do at runtime for all the other nodes in the Event Editor. (Think of the options you have in RPG Maker when creating an event. I have to code every single one of those options...) Still, if I can get to the end of this month with just the Show Message event working, all the others will be super easy to add once the functionality is there.. and once all that has been wired up... I'll be thinking about the Beta release Finally, I'm going to be creating a Discord server soon, and focusing most of my updates there. I'll post an invite link here once I get round to it.

Your timing is actually impeccable. That is exactly what I'm starting work on tomorrow. The way UR-RPG works (Or will work very soon) is the cross is unpassable, the circle is pass over and star is pass under. I'm not sure if that's actually how RPG Maker does it... I've been using MV as my reference and I thought that's what the Star did... If I'm wrong on that, please let me know. I might need to have another play around with it to remind myself how it works.

Yeah I get your point And you're right. Keeping it simple is always better imo. Just don't want to over simplify. It's not really supposed to be a final anything right now though. I just wrote something out when I needed some flavor text for my website... when I get the time I'll take another stab at it.

Just wanted to share a demo of the finished animated autotiles. Just like RPG Maker, all you have to do is drop the sprite sheets into the right folder. UR-RPG will then do all the work to turn the sprite sheets into usable Unity RuleTiles. Setting these up by hand would take around 15 or even 30 minutes per tile, but UR-RPG can create over 200 within a second. Setting up your tilesets is the exact same workflow as RPG Maker. Just create the tileset and set each tiles data in the database. I've created a quick 1 min video example of animated autotiles working, but it's too large for this forum, so I posted it to Twitter. (Also please let me know if it's blurry. It's HD when I upload it... I don't whats going on with that).

Been a while since I posted an update but I've not been slacking, trust me. The Database is now fully functional! All tabs have been completed, including Animation. I then started a new Map Editor... and then rewrote the code... twice. However, with the exception of the Add Event window, the Map Editor is now complete. If anyone wants to see actual video of what I have so far in action, let me know. This means, next week I'll be starting the runtime engine. This is the part that takes all the data made with the UR-RPG tools and actually builds a playable game from it when you hit the 'Play' button in Unity. I'll be starting with the basic Scene manager and creating some basic scenes. Mainly the Map scene as I will also be making the Map Manager and Player Controller. From there it will simply be a matter of creating all the different scenes (Map, Window, Menu, Shop, Title, Game Over etc) and creating the Event system. The Event system is pretty straight forward stuff....buuutttt... probably going to take the most time to implement. Now I really don't want to jinx things since development has gone so well so far, but, if things do continue to progress at this pace I could have this out within a couple of months. (Originally I thought it would take a year). So much so I've actually begun thinking about release. Once I have everything functioning, I'm going to release a Beta version to Patron. This version is probably going to be buggy, but it'll be considered a pre-release release. Hopefully I will be able to get some user feedback and real world application feedback which I could perhaps work in while I clean up the code for an actual release. I'm also just looking for testers in general so if you want to have an early go with Ultimate Retro RPG, send me a DM and we can talk

I've been testing my new map editor for my UR-RPG project and I need to collect some data so I know if my map editor is up to the task. Can you guys let me know how large your maps are generally speaking, and what the largest map you've created is? My map editor can currently handle 120 x 120, but it's started to get a bit laggy. I have some ideas for optimization and final size will be larger than that, but I may have to apply a limit on map sizes. Personally, I don't think I've ever made a map as large as 120 x 120 in RPG Maker, and maybe 150 x 150 would be sufficient. What do you guys think?

Lol, that was a joke mate

Spining floor puzzles (Like Rocket HQ in Pokemon Red) Data collection (Think how picking up a memo in Resident Evil might have a safe code in it); Item collection (To unlock door to dungeon you need the Phoenix Mirror and Dragon Mirror for example); Maze puzzle (Using layering and tricks to conceal pathways. Riddles are under rated... That's what I can think of just off the top of my head. Depending on the coding experience you also have things like picture sorting puzzles.

Hey guys, first time mapping... How's my England? ....Be honest.

Thanks Natsuki Follow the main thread for the main updates. And thanks Roninator, I was thinking 500 x 500 would be a reasonable cap. But this thread has actually become moot. I gutted the code today. I won't get too technical, but if anyone else is looking to create a custom tile editor, just use Unity's in built Tilemap system. Now I'm making maps as large as 2000 x 2000 and PC isn't even breaking a sweat. Loading is still very much a chore, especially when every tile is used on every layer but anything below 250 x 250 is pretty much instantaneous and 500 x 500 taking about 30 seconds or so. If you can tolerate the 15 min load for a 2000 x 2000 map, once it is loaded, you can easily edit with no lag at all. Basically, any limitation now is down to user hardware, and Unity. One of the things I'm 100% adding when I get to coding the Runtime side of things is a 2D version of ambient occlusion, which is when it only renders the tiles the camera can see. That way I'll never need more tiles than what I can fit within the screen, so the load times will always be tiny regardless of map size. I might actually achieve my goal of maps large enough to create open word games. Screenshot from when I was stress testing a 1000 x 1000 map.

Thanks for the reply Natsuki. I'm not actually making a game, but a tool for making an RPG in Unity.... Essentially, RPG Maker for Unity. I've posted about the project here. Haven't updated the thread recently, but I have essentially completed the database part of the project and I'm now working on the Map Editor. I've continued testing since I made the OP and I can support up to 150 x 150, but things will get laggy. Don't know how much you know about Unity, but it uses a thing called a GameObject. Currently, every tile is it's own GameObject, so with a 150 x 150 map, that's 22, 500 GameObjects. Then on top of that, there are 4 layers, so that's 90,000 GameObjects... annnddd this is why Unity is getting laggy. The solution I have come up with, is to remove the 4 layers, and just have a single layer of GameObjects, with 4 separate sprites per GameObject, and just set their order using Unity's Sorting Layer on the SpriteRenderers. I don't feel like 150 x 150 is large enough but if I move things to a single layer, this is going to cause it's own set of problems and requires A LOT of re-writing. Still, if it requires re-writing, better do it now than later... so need to know what kind of map sizes they'd be happy with. I've attached a screenshot of the WIP on the Map Editor.

I've actually had the same thought. I had an idea of doing a demo game for my larger typical RPG game called an NPC's quest. I was going to call it 'An NPC Quest'. The idea is that you play a random NPC in a village and you have a set routine you have to adhere to so you can pay your taxes to the castle. Each day you go to work, interact with other villagers and learn a snippet, but heavily bias part of the usual grand RPG story from the main game. However, the NPC you play as lives in a village that belongs to the opposing faction from the main game, so the news you're getting is basically propaganda because the printing press is owned by the royal family who paint the heroes of the main game as the bad guys. All the villagers believe themselves to be the good guys... At a couple of points the heroes will pass through the village and you (as an NPC) will get to interact with them. Initially, you'll be very restricted and only be able to access the smithery where you work, the main village (but can't enter houses), the local shop and your own house... however, as the game progresses, you'll get chances to go against the narrative and 'break your programming' allowing you to enter area's you shouldn't have access to. By breaking the routine you're told to, acting kindly to the heroes you're told to hate, going against royal instruction and snooping around with your new found freedom, you'll start to learn a different side to the story... all of which gives clues and would tie into the full story of the main game. You can also mess with other NPCs to break their programming to. So say someone has an item they use in their daily routine, you can steal that item to see how they react when they can't complete their job. However, if you act too out of character, the other villagers will consider you 'a bug' and start to become hostile to you, eventually expelling you from the village. You can still sneak into town to mess with the other NPCs, however, if you get spotted you'll get expelled back to the forest. The game would only last for a set amount of time (say 2 months), and you'll get a good or bad ending depending on how many NPC's you help break their programming. Figured in the main game, as the heroes, there could be a side quest where you have to find the NPC from the demo, and set in motion events that would happen in the demo. Then later, when you return to the village you can see would happen after you got the good ending and how it affected the village once they break free from their Royal oppression.

Anyone have any Discord groups they can recommend for Unity / RPG Maker communities?

Good news update: I want to keep this short so I'll save you the details. TLDR version: Started week off with a broken project (Unity's fault), and a broken spirit. The last back up I had was before I had recorded the previous video so that back up didn't have the Mob/Troop tab. On top of that, I only had Wednesday and Thursday off to focus on the project BUT... during those two days I've been able to: Rebuild the entire project from a new, non-broken, Unity project. Refactor the Visual Editor script so it no longer requires it's own separate window and created the Global Event tab. Finish off the Mob/Troop window, including optimizing it so it no longer lags and added it's own Visual Script area for creating up to 20 battle events. Created the Types tab (Which I forgot about...). ALMOST finished the Tileset editing tab. Just need to code in the ability to set collision, counter, damage floor etc. Hoping to get that done this weekend at some point... Please pray to whatever deity you choose that we have no more issues

Hey guys, firstly, happy Thanksgiving to any American fwens out there. As a Bri'ish chap, it's just a normal weekend for me and I'm spending it working on my Unity project. I'm making the window for generating EXP curves for classes, and need some help understanding the maths behind how it works. Obviously, the base value and added value are added together to create the required EXP from level 0 - 1, but anyone know the maths to how the Acceleration A and B values work out the rest of the values?

Quick Update So, I booked the week off work to get some bits done....all of which I abandoned so I could spend the last 3 days working on UR-RPG. On Monday, only the Actor tab of the database was complete. Now all I have left to design are the Troop, Tileset and Animation tabs! I've also updated it to make sure it works with the latest Unity release. This morning, I started work on the Troop tab with only a slight idea of how I was going to get it working, but not actually knowing if it was going to be possible to do in a custom Unity Editor Window.... 9 hours later, it was basically fully functional! All that remains is adding the Visual Script Editor, which I already have the code for, just need to refactor a bit so I can nest it into other windows... but it's 11pm, I've been up since 9am working on this. I need some down time. Here's the work so far. It's a little rough around the edges and needs optimization, but the priority was 'just get it to work'. It also played up a little because my computer is arse, and I had Adobe Audition, OBS, Unity, Visual Studio, RPG Maker MV and about 50+ Brave tabs open..... but here it is TroopTabDemo.mp4

Thank you

Hey guys, I'm elCodes and I'm hoping I'm not going to get banned for this, but I'm not actively working on an RPG Maker project... Though I've used RPG Maker since XP up to MV, I switched to Unity years ago. This isn't an advertisement (because I don't want to break any rules), but I am working on a Unity asset that will be an all-in-one RPG creation suite. Think RPG Maker for Unity. I'm here for 2 reasons. To find an artist. To get back into the community and just chat with people to find out what potential features they would like to see. So yeah, hopefully I won't get banned for this and look forward to chatting to you all.

Hey guys, As stated in my intro post, I'm working on a Unity asset which essentially is RPG Maker in Unity. As I've been developing, I've been using the standard assets I got from MV but now I'm at a point where I want to start promoting it... and for legal reasons I obviously can't use the official RPG Maker assets in any of my promo images. I don't want to just steal some random assets off the web either because I want the artists consent. So I'm looking for 3 assets: A facepic and matching character sprite sheet for a screenshot of the database. A tile set for a screenshot of the map editor. If anyone can help out with this I'd appreciate if greatly, and add full credits and any link backs on the official website. Ta. EDIT: Forgot to mention, assets need to be MV compatible! EDIT2: Alternatively, if anyone knows of any websites with free assets I could use where I can get in touch with the artist that would also be helpful. I tried it and ended up in pop-up hell.....