Trying to make my first game, posting ideas, advice accepted

So to start, for almost six months now I have had RPG Maker (MV to be exact) in an attempt to finally create my own video game like I’ve always wanted. Unfortunately, I am trying to manage my time since I only have three off days and figuring out how to spend that time making the game in question. Secondly, I don’t have any friends that have RPG Maker, and despite me offering to share the program they still don’t want to help me make the game. So I have to make an entire video game by myself. Any advice on how to do that would be great, and if anyone wants to actually make the game with me would be indescribable help. Lastly, I’ll be posting plot ideas, character ideas, the usual storyboarding stuff if you will when it comes to me. Plus since this is my first post (I literally just created my account a few minutes ago), I would be able to practice with the forum to improve my structure and not let it be some massive paragraph. Like this one.

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My advice is, don’t start off waaay to ambitious, it’ll lead to you getting burnt out. Start of small, don’t focus much on story and instead focus on the other aspects, characters, setting, etc. If you have a story, making it subtle is a good move in my mind. That’s my advice at least, others view it differently.

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Super super important, as with any new challenge anyone chooses to tackle. It sounds like you’re already running into some frustrations regarding how much work you’ll have to shoulder on your own, but keep in mind that the process only gets easier the more you work at it.

I’d suggest creating an entire playable game within a single tiny room in MV. After that, you’ll have mastered most of the basics of map-making, character-making, movement, etc. Then, you can just continue building off of that one room! I think that a big problem that bogs down RPGMaker game creators at the very start is trying to make an entire game’s maps all in one go. It’s a very time consuming process, making maps from the tiles you have available, and can lead very quickly to losing passion for the project, so starting out room by room is a much better approach in my opinion.

If you need any help with any of the technical aspects, or with ideation/story-making, there’s plenty of people on this forum that would be more than happy to lend a hand, so ask away!

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I want to thank everyone so much for such wonderful advice, and I’ll work on getting it set up. Although I’ll admit I don’t know how to post it on here, like a demo, when it is ready.

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Once you have a demo simply upload to something like Mega or Googledrive and then paste the link into a post on here :slightly_smiling_face:

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When it comes to using RPGMaker, I highly suggest watching videos by SRDude on Youtube. He has a whole series up there starting with the basics. Watch his (Or any) tutorials, take it slow, have fun mapping areas and taking baby steps- and with enough time you’ll get a decent project going.

Another important thing is to mess around with events and try to learn how they work. Events can be characters, directions for cutscenes, objects, or all of the above. If you learn to master them or just understand how they flow and work, you can make just about anything want. Events are what makes RPGMaker flow and work as a game.

Finally, if you’re making a map in RPGMaker MV (im not sure about the other versions) theres an auto-mapping feature; which makes the game automatically shift tiles around to make areas look more natural. You can hold shift to put tiles down exactly as they appear to be. I wish someone told me about this when I started, but If you learn to play with it now then your maps can look amazing as the auto tile sometimes gets in the way.

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