How do you guys feel about making a game without plugins or at least without third party plugins?
Using plugins that come with the engine and plugins you’ve written yourself are fine, but I’m mainly curious about avoiding community made third party plugins.
The good news is it makes your game much easier to code and design. Debugging is much simpler as your game has less moving parts with less potential for difficult bugs.
It’s really uncommon because the majority of people aren’t making DQ-like games. You’re also missing out on potential quality-of-life improvements that can streamline the player experience.
The main hazard is if you’re trying to cleverly use the events system to code game mechanics when a plugin would perform better. Events works best when treated like cutscenes.
Of course. It’s very simple, produces the desired effect, and has few bugs.
Also it’s a lot easier in the long run. especially if your really good with using events for various stuff. especially relying on fewer if not any plugins.
It’s a very fun challenge to come up with more creative eventing solutions for those like myself who use tons of plugins.
These are all really good points that I honestly hadn’t considered.
My original thought was that people mainly use plugins to expand the engine’s capabilities and make their games stand out. But I wonder if the opposite can sometimes happen. When everyone is using the same popular plugins made by Yanfly, Galv, and other well known developers, certain mechanics, menus, and UI elements start showing up in a lot of games. It can make projects feel the same as others.
That’s why I was thinking eventing and/or writing your own plugins might actually make your game stand out. You can build systems that fit your game’s design instead of adapting your game around someone else’s plugin.
What do you guys think?
This is not the proper way to use plugins.
This is the proper way to use plugins. If there’s a system you want to make, the first thing you should do (other than maybe finding a way to do it with eventing) is to search and see if someone has already made a plugin. Why waste your time coding your own plugin when someone else already made exactly what you need? But if you can’t find one, or the ones you do find aren’t quite right, then sure, you can make your own.
Plugins are just another tool. If they suit your game, use them. If they don’t, don’t. And, ideally, steer away from monolithic plugins like Yanfly/VisuStella, because they do too many things. This is bad because within one plugin you might have ten things that suit your game and twelve things that don’t.
Starting out, you want to focus on just what RPG Maker can do by itself. Work with the event commands to create the mechanics & systems you want.
Compared to doing those with plugins, your game will be more stable, and your systems & mechanics won’t conflict with each other. And you can easily swap mechanics in & out or make them work together.
It’s very easy for me to have multiple different evented battle systems in my game, and to switch through them in my game (from event to event), or make them work together. Compared to using plugins of different battle systems from different plugin developers, and make them work with each other. (Same with the menu.)
A lot of people rely so much on plugins, that they install plugins to do things that the base engine can do by itself with a bit of work. They bloat their games with unnecessary processes & code, end up replacing a flexible system within the base engine that can be adjusted via event commands and make it fixed & rigid, and also end up adopting systems into their game that a thousand other people are using in their own games.
but I’m mainly curious about avoiding community made third party plugins
Once you become good at eventing (i.e, creating systems & mechanics using event commands). Then, instead of getting plugins that create whole systems & mechanics & do UI overhaul of your game (that a lot of other people are using as well), you can have plugins that enhance your capabilities to do eventing & create your own systems.
Like, there is a plugin in MV that allows me to crop the picture I’m showing. And another plugin that allows me to to change the walk-sprite’s angle in set movement route. And another plugin that allows me to change the color of the text in ‘Show Text’ by hex-code, instead of being fixed to 1-32 number codes.
^~ these are not whole systems, but rather, these are like add-on to the base event commands system.
I don’t think you or anyone should avoid installing such plugins. 
You should however, avoid installing a whole battle system. Or a movement system. Or a menu system, e.t.c e.t.c.
And also avoid any ‘core’ plugins or obfuscated plugins.
Know that a lot of these plugins are made by people who don’t develop finished games themselves. And so, they haven’t used their plugins with a released & polished game, and ensured its functionality & stability in all aspects. And so you’ll find plugins that create full systems can have severe defects, that you realize later on in development. When it’s too late to pull them out.
When you’re only installing plugins that are adding small event command enhancements here and there (like the ones I mentioned above), it becomes very easy to pull (a single plugin from among) them out should you discover a grave defect.
I don’t like using other people’s plugins. I think the only one I like is MZ3D, and that’s not something I’ll be throwing at every single thing I’ll make.
I don’t work with MZ that much but last time I had this going. A mystery dungeon sort of thing built from scratch.
The one issue is of course workload. But if it’s for building basic systems, I don’t think it’s that bad to spend the time doing it yourself.
I tend to use plugins, and then tweak them to fit my visual style, and sometime I slightly change the functionality. Using plugins saves huge amounts of developing time, and it also teaches me the approach of other developers. Of course this applies to functional plugins mainly, and only to plugins that are not obfuscated. Another advantage is that when using plugins, the code and functionality has been tested intensively by many users.
I actually have a game idea that involves making a full RPG Maker game without using any plugins beyond what the engine came with! It’s mainly meant as a way to stretch the limits of the engine and see what I can make of it.
I think it’s a fine thing to do, since the engine itself is already super flexible. All that you need is outside the box thinking, some elbow grease, and maybe a bit of JS knowledge if you really want. For example, for that game I mentioned above, I came up with a shared TP system where every party member used the same TP bar, inspired by Skies of Arcadia’s Spirit Bar. I think if you don’t explore how to make things with “vanilla” RPG Maker, then you’re missing out on improving your skills and understanding.
No.
There is a reason why there are so many battle system plugins. It’s because a lot of people don’t like the default battle system in RPGMaker. If you don’t like it, it’s totally fine to replace it. The same goes for movement.
Still, I would say it’s a good idea to make a game without any such big plugins first, even a small game, to get a better feel of how things are by default and how you’d like them to be different.
This is truly not something to be wary of in and of itself. In fact, developing plugins can be said to be a bit of a different skill from developing games, so it shouldn’t be too surprising that some people do only one of them and not both. Of course, that still means testing the plugin for stability is on them, though. That doesn’t require having a released and polished game – it just requires having a comprehensive and polished demo.
I think you’re missing the point here. The flexibility of the engine is something that can’t be fully tapped without plugins – the editor is fixed and rigid, imposing constraints upon the designer that don’t exist in the engine code.
For example, elemental absorb is fully supported in the engine – just add an Element Rate trait with a negative value. It works perfectly with no issues (other than the fact that two absorb traits would cancel out). Only problem is, the editor won’t let you set an Element Rate trait to a negative value, so you need a plugin to work around that.
But it’s perfectly fine to challenge yourself to avoid plugins, and as you say, it’s a good way to learn what the engine is capable of.
Well i actually dont mind that to much even if i personally prefer to make my own plugins its just more fitting for you own game if you make you own but i understand that not everyone is able to do that ^^
I don’t feel like I’m missing the point, since the topic was about how we feel about making a game without plugins (at least, third party ones). I gave my opinion and an anecdote about a project I’m working on in relation to that.
Regardless, you are correct that my words might have oversold the engine’s own capabilities. RPG Maker is very rigid in what it lets you do, since if it wasn’t, most beginners would get lost in the sauce, after all. I’m just saying that if you know what you’re doing, you can get away with a surprising amount of things that most would not expect you to be able to do.
Your words have not oversold the engine’s capabilities. The engine is very flexible. It’s the editor that’s rigid and inflexible. Though as you say, there may be good reasons for that.
