Starting a project feels tedious: We need built-in asset creation tools, not default bloat

RPGツクール 雑談
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Hi everyone,

As a new user, I wanted to share a frustrating part of my workflow. Every time I want to start a new project, the initial setup, asset creation and integration feels incredibly tedious.

My biggest gripe is the lack of asset creation tools within the engine itself. You cannot easily create and add assets on the fly. Ideally, I would love to start with an empty tileset and use a built-in image editor to draw floors, walls, and props, having the engine automatically append them to the tileset.

Other engines like GameMaker and Clickteam Fusion offer this exact workflow, making creation seamless and fast. In RPG Maker, the constant back and forth between external software just slows everything down. It would be a great quality of life improvement when added to the engine.

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To be quite honest, I think that integrating an image editor into the RPGMaker editor would just be a waste of their time. It would inevitably fall short relative to a dedicated image editor, and I think most people would still end up using an external editor quite frequently (though, probably not quite as frequently as now).[1]

But making an editor that lets you easily move tiles around on the tilesheet would be very useful. Probably about 90% of my editing is of that form. There’s a post on here about a Tileset Editor which might partly satisfy that need, though from what I recall it doesn’t really go far enough. Though I said “tilesheet”, this isn’t something that’s limited to just tilesets – it applies to spritesheets, face sheets, balloon sheets, icon sheets, weapon sheets, and more. Just being able to drag tiles or faces or whatever around, knowing that they’ll snap into places properly, would be a big help.

I do agree that it would be nice if there were a few more “new project” options, like a project with a blank database (but with all the assets), or a project with nothing at all (no database, no assets).

  1. The one possible exception to this is autotiles. It would be incredibly helpful to have an autotile editor where you can see the autotile fully-expanded and edit it in-place, and whenever you place a pixel, it automatically updates in real time. Still, it probably wouldn’t be worth going much further than just a basic “place pixels”. ↩︎

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In VX Ace I have a project that I emptied out, I just copy it and rename the folder when I want a blank project, I haven’t tried that with the newer RPG Makers though.

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It’ll definitely work with MV and MZ. Someone even went so far as to post an empty project on itch.io just so you don’t have to deal with all that yourself.

The main problem is that everyone probably has different opinions on what it means for a project to be “empty”. For example, I can’t really give up on the default SEs, and in some projects I’d definitely like to have most or all of the default graphics. It might just be easiest for each person to build their own templates, either manually as @Vitals said or by directly editing the newdata folders.

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I used to have a clean project in VXAce because the new project window crashed the editor, for some reason, lol. Or was it MV? idk.

Now with MZ, yeahhh it’s kinda tedious but I’ve done it at least twice already this year lol, it’s not so bad, tho it feels like a waste to have the program copy all the files, only for me to delete them all again lol.

Should be easy to do both the no-database and the nothing-at-all ones. And even nothing-but-SEs. :stuck_out_tongue:

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They could allow you to select which assets and predefined settings you’d like included in a new project.

An official implementation would make the engine feel more thought through.

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I believe adding QoL features and Rapid Application Development (RAD) tools would be a highly valuable investment. Rather than wasting time, these updates would help modernize the RPG Maker engines. Right now, the engine’s evolution feels a bit stagnant.

To clarify, my goal isn’t to bash RPG Maker, it is a fantastic engine! I just want to see it continue to grow and introduce new features for everyone’s benefit.

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I probably should have made separate posts about the 2 issues I mentioned.

It is mostly the asset creation workflow which I don’t like, especially after using other engines that handle it better.

I still don’t see why an official implementation of an empty project shouldn’t be added. It can allow you to select what predefined assets and settings you want in your project. It shouldn’t be that hard to implement.

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Blender has a nice little solution to this. It simply tracks whether a texture you’re using gets changed while the application is running, and automatically reloads it. Not exactly an in engine editor, but it still improves workflow quite a bit being able to Ctrl + E from one program then tab back over to RPG Maker.

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Well, there is the character generator, which basically covers character sprites, especially walkingsprites. Though I do use the 8D Character Creator by Lowsprites to cover side ways battler sprites for actors.

Otherwise I just use pre made assets, maybe with slight edits. I don’t have the necessary skills to create assets from scratch.

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RPGMaker MZ somewhat does this. It’s a bit unreliable, but with a bit of fiddling it’s usually possible to get it to recognize an updated asset without reloading the project.

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I suggest focusing on faster ways to create original content instead of reusing uninspired pre-made assets. Relying too heavily on the default 48x48 assets can hurt your game. It makes it look generic, amateurish and straight up ugly.

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I somewhat disagree. The default pre-made assets aren’t the best, and they’re not quite to my taste, but they are very high quality. It’ll look generic if you exclusively use them, yes, because so many other games use the same assets; but I would never call it ugly.

But definitely edit them to your taste. Recolour, remix, grab bits other people have edited, and so forth. There’s a wealth of add-ons to the default assets that many people have made for free – use them!

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The beauty of RPG Maker is that it can be used by both hobbyists and professional game developers. If you are creating a hobby game for friends, you will find everything you need within RPG Maker. If you have a more professional approach, you will need to develop your own workflow—just as you would with other game engines. Using multiple tools is not uncommon, and “cleaning up” a project accounts for a mere 0.01% of the total development time. If you have ever created an RPG in, say, Unity (not Unite) or GameMaker, RPG Maker will feel like a breath of fresh air. The grid limitations (16, 24, 32, or 48) are a small price to pay for that.

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I don’t know why but they give me a cheap jrpg. The 48x48 resolution on all RPG games aside if they were made in RPG Maker or not, looks a bit off. It doesn’t have the same charm as 16x16 or a more stylized simpler not so hyper noise/detailed art style.

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This isn’t it. Unless they plan to integrate it into the engine itself.

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I agree it seems kinda stupid not having something like that built in considering it’s supposed to be this super easy game engine, but I think it’s really just apart of it’s identity like it forces the people that want to really make something to leave the confines of the base engine and be creative. Though as I’m writing this I found the RPG Maker Tileset Builder on steam. Steamで20% OFF：RPGツクールMZ - Tileset Builder , from the looks of it, it seems to be something similar to what you want but really really barebones, and I haven’t seen many good reviews of it yet.

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RPG Maker 2000 is so good.

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Personally, I prefer the default assets that come with RPG Maker engines compared to like 90% of what other people create themselves for their own games.

Generally speaking, if someone has the artistic talent to make good assets on their own, for a game they want to make… they aren’t using RPG Maker that much, as their talents would be better served in an engine of, shall we say… higher quality. You may have outlier artists and such, but they’re outliers for a reason.

From my point of view, I’m not convinced an “asset maker” in the engine would actually help many people. Especially those who aren’t that artistic to begin with. Especially when we consider the quality and “not user friendly” nature of what we do have in the engine to “create your own assets”. One need only look at how cumbersome and rough it is to create your own animations in the engine to imagine how that level of quality would translate to creating your own sprite sheets, or tilesets.

Don’t get me wrong, I love RPG Maker (it’s my engine of choice from everything on the market, currently, as it fits my skill level, skill set, and personal sensibilities of game design), but I do not carry misplaced confidence in the engine or what the team who revamps the engine every few years is capable of making. It’s made decently clear on every release that they don’t have a QA department, for starters. Nobody that goes in and tests functionality or ensures the documentation explains correctly what a feature does (or how it works) within the engine. The fact that a lot of the features are like nested menus upon nested menus for design is already sort of a problem.

I, personally, would not request a feature of the engine that the dev teams have no hope of pulling off even moderately well. But, that’s just me.

The engine is as “bare bones” as possible so that those who truly want to make a game with it, will put in all the effort in the world to do so and go wherever they need to, to make it happen. I think everyone else just needs to use the program to learn how game design works, or learn whether or not they even have the passion to make a game.

It is what it is. The program needs a lot of features, and reworks, and edits. But, I just don’t think the team in charge of each new rework of th engine is capable of (or hired for) that kind of programming work. I think what they’re usually capable of is adding minor features through some simple programming.

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