Starting Out with RPG Maker MV

Transcription

1 CHAPTER 1 Starting Out with RPG Maker MV This chapter will cover the following subjects: Installing RPG Maker MV (RMMV) A short overview of story and game play in roleplaying games (RPGs) Starting up RPG Maker and taking your first steps toward creating your very own game Note This book will exclusively cover RPG Maker MV. If you have an earlier version of the engine (such as XP, VX, or VX Ace), you will have to upgrade to MV to follow along. Before you can use RMMV, you must have it installed. First, I ll walk you through the process of getting and installing your own copy of RMMV. Where Can I Get RMMV? RMMV (and a slew of related products) can be purchased from the official site at The exact link is Alternately, RMMV is also available from Steam. Note If you re a Mac user, you ll need to grab the Steam version, as the standalone installer is Windows-only. When it s not on sale, RMMV costs $79.99, but you can try it free for 20 days by grabbing the trial version if you re a Windows user. Unfortunately, Mac users have no trial version at this time; a situation we can only hope changes eventually. You will be asked for your name and address when you download the RMMV trial. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this chapter (doi: / _1 ) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. Darrin Perez 2016 D. Perez, Beginning RPG Maker MV, DOI / _1 3

2 So, I Downloaded a Copy of RMMV. What Next? If you have a standalone version of RMMV, what follows next is finding the downloaded archive and running the Setup.exe located within it. Afterward, installing it is as easy as following the steps in the installer. Once the installation is complete, loading it up for the first time will bring up a screen such as illustrated in Figure 1-1. Figure 1-1. The starting screen for trial versions of RMMV The screenshot is pretty self-explanatory. If you have purchased RMMV, you need only type in your product key as well as the you provided at that time to activate the software by clicking on the Activate button. Otherwise, you can click on Buy Now to buy a copy of RMMV. If you would rather keep using the trial, you can just click Continue. Note If you re using the Steam version, that platform will automatically install RMMV for you once you purchase it and choose to download it. As it is a full version by default, you shouldn t have to worry about the activation screen just described. 4

3 So, I m Done CHAPTER 1 STARTING OUT WITH RPG MAKER MV Welcome to the world of video game development! I hope you enjoy your stay! Now that you have a functioning copy of RMMV, we can continue. Before we start using the application, it would be good to talk about RPG design in general. Let us begin with the most important aspect, the story. Note The current version of RPG Maker MV at the time of this writing is version 1.1. If you have a newer version of the software, it may include extra features not discussed here. Story Perhaps the most important thing about an RPG is its story. Even in the days of old, when the first Dragon Quest (known as Dragon Warrior in the United States until the eighth entry in the series was released) and Final Fantasy games were in their prime and storage was an issue with the earliest consoles, RPG developers sought to invest their players into the simple plot that they managed to fit within the cartridge. Perhaps the most important thing I can point out is that not every story needs to be complex. Complexity helps, sure, if you can make it work. Sometimes, it s the little things that have the greatest impact. The basic facets of any basic RPG story are virtually identical to those used in your standard fantasy or sci-fi book with a heroic protagonist: You have a protagonist : In an RPG, this is the main character controlled by the player. The protagonist is a distinct entity, with goals, dreams, and desires. You have a conflict : The most typical fantasy conflict for both books and video games is a great evil that rises, and only the hero/chosen one/protagonist (whether alone or with help) can defeat them. With that said, don t limit yourself. If you come up with a great plot that involves a conflict between the protagonist and himself, for example, feel free to take that ball and run with it. You have obstacles : Think back to the last RPG you played or fantasy book you read. The protagonist did not start the adventure and defeat the main villain within ten minutes/pages (if they did, it was probably a fake-out and not an actual victory). The protagonist probably started from a position of relative weakness and set out into the world to defeat the antagonist, being deterred every so often by hostile forces (some aligned with evil, and some not) and hindrances such as a broken bridge or a collapsed mine shaft. You have a climax and a resolution : The protagonist, after countless tribulations, finally reaches the castle of the Dark Lord. With a carefully calculated strike of his weapon of choice, he defeats his timeless foe. Or does he? Depending on the type of story you want to tell, perhaps your antagonist escapes to live another day. Perhaps he was merely subordinate to an even greater evil. A great story can save an otherwise mediocre RPG, but a mediocre story can ruin even great RPGs. You must define what type of story your RPG will have. Following are some questions that should get you thinking along the right track: Will it be a fantasy RPG? If so, will magic be prominent? Will alternate forms of abilities, such as technology or something else altogether, take center stage? Or will you have a sci-fi RPG? That s neat, too. Will technology be prominent, or will the setting be a devastated future where everyone is basically surviving with sticks and stones? 5

4 When will the story take place? You can have a modern-day story set in a high school, for example, or a historical spy thriller set during the cold war. Maybe you want your story to take place in prehistory! Who is your protagonist? Is he young? Old? Is your protagonist female? Define why your protagonist is doing what he/she is doing. A good backstory can set the stage for greater things during the actual story. Who are your protagonist s allies? Do they know each other at the time of the game s events, or will they meet one during the game? Define their backstories. Or perhaps you want a mysterious type in your party? Those are cool too, if you know how to create them. What is your protagonist s quest? Is he/she seeking an artifact to save the world? Or perhaps the end of the world will be brought about by a heinous villain. Of course, you could just do something else entirely and have your party go on a journey of selfdiscovery. Who are some important nonplayer characters in the story? Will they aid or hinder the party? Are any of them related to any of your party members? All of those questions are good to consider for getting the ball rolling on a great story. It s important to take some time to think about the story you want for your game before you get too invested in trying to actually create it. Or maybe you don t want to make an RPG at all. Although this book is meant to teach you about the intricacies of RMMV via the creation of an RPG, there s nothing to prevent you from applying the knowledge you will gain from this book to create something completely different. You could use RMMV s framework to create a game that eschews battles and magic systems altogether! In fact, there have been many games created with earlier versions of RPG Maker that are not RPGs. Off the top of my head, I can offer You Are Not the Hero (YANTH, for short) for RPG Maker VX Ace, which is a quirky action-platformer with many minigames and a self-aware sense of humor. You could take it even further by creating, with the engine, an interactive novel in the same vein as To the Moon ( created using RPG Maker XP ). At the end of the day, the only limits to your story are those you place on yourself. Game Play Of course, while the story of an RPG is important, you want your game play to be a bit more enticing than just going into a single 30-floor dungeon and killing things (although that has worked on more than one occasion as well, especially for action RPGs). Basically, ask yourself this question: Would I play this game from start to finish? If you can t answer yes to that question with a straight face, you have to re-evaluate your game, or have friends do it for you. A tried-and-true template for an RPG s game flow is the following: A town gives the player quests with objectives located at a nearby dungeon. The dungeon is filled with those objectives and a boss. After defeating the boss, the player unlocks the next area. This is a new town and a new dungeon. Repeat until the final dungeon with the final boss. It may seem ridiculously simple and boring, but several famous RPG franchises ( Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy come to mind) had plots for most of their earlier iterations that followed that general sequence. Of course, there s no problem with making the game a bit more nonlinear and allowing your 6

5 players to branch off into areas they perhaps shouldn t be in yet (as long as there is an appropriate risk-toreward ratio). Also evaluate whether you want to add vehicles to your game, such as airships, submarines, or horses. You might even make certain vehicles available only after lengthy side quests but reward the player for doing those quests by allowing the special vehicle to access otherwise inaccessible areas. Here are some other things to consider concerning your game s play: What type of progression will you be using? Will you have the conventional system of gaining experience via combat/quest completion and then grant skills/spells/ abilities as your characters level up? Or maybe you will go for something a little less conventional, perhaps a system similar to Final Fantasy 2 (the real FF2, not the one released in the West that is technically Final Fantasy 4 ), in which you get stats by doing, so that if you take hits, you gain health. If you cast a spell, you gain magic points, and so forth. How difficult do you want the game to be? Easier isn t always equal to boring, mind you. Chrono Trigger is one of the most renowned Japanese RPGs of all time, and I ve always felt that the battle system and encounters were on the easier side for such a game. Shin Megami Tensei, on the other hand, is rather fair, if extremely challenging, for newer players. Fairness is ultimately more important than difficulty when it comes to RPG game play. How many characters will the player s party have? Is the protagonist an army of one, or does he/she have allies? I ll elaborate on the importance of this in the following paragraphs. Balance is an important consideration when you are designing your game. A preceding bullet point asks about party size. There is a concept in video game theory, especially related to turn-based games, called action economy. Generally, each character gets only a certain number of actions in the period of time defined as a turn. The more characters you have, the more actions your party receives in total. For example, the original Dragon Quest had the player control a single hero. That meant effects that caused the player character to miss a turn (such as sleep) were particularly dangerous. It also created a trade-off whereby if you were close to defeating an enemy but your hero was near death, you had to decide whether to heal yourself or attack again. If you were making an RPG with a single playable character, you would have to keep such facts in mind. On the flip side, if you have a party of three or four characters, you must design some of the party s potential enemies around that. Maybe the party will face off against venomous plants that can spew poison at the entire group. When you have multiple characters, you can be a little more liberal with effects that cause turn-skipping, as the player would still have other characters to defeat those effects or otherwise continue fighting. A game s balance is one of the hardest things to perfect but is, thankfully, something you can work toward with the feedback you receive from your game s players and your own play-testing. Entire works have been written about video game design, and it is beyond the scope of this book to discuss the topic further at this time. Even so, I will touch upon a few other facets of RPG game design specifically in later chapters, as the need arises. Let us move on to a basic overview of RMMV itself. So, you ve probably already started up RMMV and have taken a cursory look around. If you have just recently installed the software (and gotten past the Product Activation screen if you re using the standalone version of RMMV), you ll notice that you re dumped into a lifeless screen, like the one in Figure