Thanks for the input everyone. I'm definitely going to be doing a few tutorial projects in order to build my skills to a level where I can make a larger and more complex game. I guess ultimately, we all start at the very beginning, and that's where I am right now. It is definitely a much bigger learning curve than simply make a few tilesets, make some sprite sheets, upload them to the right folders and start building and adding events.
@cybereality said:
Well £10 is not a huge investment. That is like 2 hours working at McDonald's. And it's not a waste because you learned something, and had a chance to start making your game. Any of your time you invest after realizing a solution isn't working is a loss, though.
I find these game kits (I would barely call them engines) to be too limiting. Yes, they do help if you don't know how to program, and some great games have been made with RPG Maker or Ren'Py, etc. but your game is basically the same in functionality to all the others. In fact, when I'm on Steam I typically don't buy RPG Maker made games anymore because they seem low effort and generic and not worth the money. But I understand why people use them.
Godot is a general purpose 2D/3D engine. Meaning there is no limit to what type of game or genre you can create. But because it is generic, it doesn't come with any gameplay functionality. You create that all on your own. Godot does include stuff to help you like math functions, physics and collision, tilemaps, playing sound, moving sprites and playing animation, etc. But it is up to you to combine that all together into a game.
I agree I didn't waste my time, I learned about RPG Maker, and what it can and cannot do, and I learned how to do pixel art, the latter of these skills can be applied to ANY engine that can do 2D games. I still may use it for small projects that are within the scope of it's limitations and doesn't involve battles (eg. a story where the player is a detective and has to examine clues). Overall though, learning how to do pixel art was a big plus, it means I don't have to pay other people to make it for me and gives me greater control over the graphics that are going to go into my games.
I get why a lot of RPG Maker games don't seem as appealing to some people. I mean, a lot of the games are made with the runtime package, which makes it extremely hard for a dev to actually make a game unique when it looks and sounds the same as thousands of others that came before it (some of which are good, and some truly terrible). That is actually the very reason I learned to do pixel art! Some potential buyers might just take one look at the graphics, see it's made from stock images and not even bother looking further. It's lazy and it's shooting yourself in the foot to not even bother looking for alternatives to the RTP, even if it means going onto itch or steam and buying a tilset package. It's not that the RTP is in any way bad, I used the RTP to get a feel for how RPG maker works and to learn how to map and do events containing conditional branches, but no way would I have released a game using it because it's been used to death and instantly recognisable to anyone familiar with RPG Maker. Like I said, the engine itself is a very good and useful tool, but it is also very limited in scope. The battle system though, that was the deal breaker for me.
All in all, £10 spent and a lot learned, overall it wasn't that much of a waste of money when I think about it that way, especially if I ever do use the program for a project within it's scope.
Thanks for the link! I'm going to need it to convert my RPG Maker autotiles tilesets to ones that Godot is going to understand. I probably won't need to change the B tilesets though, as those are just images of things like trees, sofas, TVs, signposts...etc. I also need to learn about animated autotiles, so A1 is going to be more of an issue than A2 where it's static textures like grass, gravel, dirt...etc. I think learning how your tilesets work might just be my very first job, if I can't even draw the world yet, how can I program it? Sprites are going to be something else that will be challenging, in RPG maker they are created with sprite sheets of 12 images (3 up, 3 right, 3 left, 3 down). So, I need to see the layout of the sprite sheets too so I know if I need to alter these and if so, how.
