making a 16 bit RPG

[chupon]

So what options does everyone recommend for making an old school RPG. Is RPG Maker XP the best? What other good options are there? Anything that can be put on a Mac? I'd love to put something like this on an ipad (stupid name).

[Niode]

So what options does everyone recommend for making an old school RPG. Is RPG Maker XP the best? What other good options are there? Anything that can be put on a Mac? I'd love to put something like this on an ipad (stupid name).

Good luck with the iPad thing. You need to pay for the SDK and release it through the Appstore. The iPad runs a variant of the iPhone OS and is not open for anybody to run anything on it. Of course if something like a jailbreak arrises for the iPad then you would be able to run software on it, but I'm assuming you don't have any or very limited programming experience so that wouldn't be much help anyway.

[chupon]

i guess i'll just keep dreaming.

[Anapan]

AFAIK, RPG Maker is still the easiest way to make an RPG. I've seen them done in clickteam's products (MMF, TGF, etc), GameMaker and RPG Toolkit as well. I heard of others around too - DIA RPG Builder, Sphere RPG Engine and XTremeWorlds. Ruby , Blitzbasic and Darkbasic are popular easy-to-use programming languages with communities that can help with problems you might encounter.

[Niode]

i guess i'll just keep dreaming.

Don't get disheartened. I just didn't want you to spend a tonne of money on an iPad for this kind of development. It would be a serious investment. Besides, with the iDevice SDK you don't even need the hardware to test, they give you a fully functional emulator to run the apps on, so you just have to compile with xcode and run as if it's native (on OSX anyway). You don't have to waste time syncing your device.


Have you got Neverwinter Nights? The script/world builder in NWN is very easy to use and has the ability to go deep into the workings of the game engine using the nwnscript. There's tonnes of example script out there and is similar to C (IIRC). That would be a nice beginning step if you're looking into getting into this as a hobby. The scripting system is pretty extensive too, I've seen levels with pubs full of completely working poker games/blackjack/roulette etc. Plus you can make your own 3D models in 3dsmax and convert them for use in NWN pretty easily too.

[emwearz]

No matter what you choose to make and RPG in, it is a MASSIVE undertaking. Even a short and basic RPG can take well over a year to make if you want it to be even half decent, one man dev team = on long fucking development time.

My one and only tip is, dont use default sprites or tilesheets, you take one look at them and want to vomit and even if you wrote the holy grail of RPG storys, it will look like utter shit.

[Anapan]

I agree on the long dev time, and to steer clear of any sort of cut&paste type graphics. If you do use resources from other games the hardest part is keeping everything in the same art style. It's very tempting to just grab the tile sheets, music, sound and sprites from some already polished games and be done, but you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone to play it.

[CDink]

Maybe you can get some other people to help you? I don't really know much about the programs you mentioned and wether or not that would be easy to do on seperate computers, but having multiple people will certainly shorten the Dev. time and take stress off you.


at any rate good luck