Game Creation/Design Catch All

I am actually a little bit excited at this announcement:
http://zbrushcore.com/mini/compare.php

Zbrush core mini - a stripped down free gateway drug for Zbrush. I will be honest that the nigh anorexic interface is way more appealing to me than even Zbrush core (which essentially cuts Zbrush's UI in half or perhaps to a third).
Definitely a bummer that 750K poly is the limit for sculpts and no ztools (multi object sculpts). But if this lets me get a leg up on becoming familiar with Zbrush's UI, I will be happy to plunk down $179 for Zbrush core. I may even use both if Mini's interface is more fluid for sculpting and core will give me access to advanced features when I'm ready.

I started up an online Unity course through Udemy about a year and a half ago and just sort of sputtered out as life got busy again. One of the creative projects that has lurked in the back of my mind for ages is to make a simple-ish JRPG that's very much in the style of the Dragon Quest series, specifically the SNES releases. I also have a couple RPGMaker versions that hit very cheap sales at some point (VX Ace and MV).

I have no intention of making a game that gets sold anywhere. It's a project that would be for me, and if I somehow ever miraculously finished it (I have a tendency to get excited about new projects but rarely finish them...) I would only have any interest in putting it up somewhere for people to download for free if they want to play it. I'm not expecting to craft anything that's commercially viable.

So anyway, all that said... I've looked over the RPGMaker core capabilities, and it only really seems to get me a bit more than halfway to what I want to accomplish. But that halfway is pretty substantial, since it would be a heavy lift for me to gain enough competency in Unity to build an engine with any kind of robustness like that. However, from what I've read, that last 30-40% of functionality for what I want involves fighting against RPGMaker more than working with it, and it's also that last 30-40% of most personal passion projects where I tend to fall off the wagon.

TL;DR (too late) - If I were to want to make a modest but relatively polished JRPG roughly equivalent to the features of the SNES Dragon Quest titles, am I better off learning Unity and building from scratch, or building with RPGMaker and fighting against its restrictions?

If you want feel free to DM me your ideas or a design doc and I can let you know of VX Ace can handle what you want. I have two released games using it and as well as a playable tech demo for an advanced FFX-style combat system. So lots of experience.

You can prototype it in RPGmaker or do a proof of concept and then migrate it to Unity as needed. Unity has "kits" that add a lot of functionality that you don't have to program. They also have widely used visual scripting languages like Playmaker and Bolt that are production proven. (some or all of Hearthstone was made with Playmaker)

Vector wrote:

If you want feel free to DM me your ideas or a design doc and I can let you know of VX Ace can handle what you want. I have two released games using it and as well as a playable tech demo for an advanced FFX-style combat system. So lots of experience.

Oh, I don't have anything that far along as far as a document, more just ideas rolling around in my head. Basically, if it was/could be done in DQ 5 or 6, I'm considering it; additionally, tinkering with the interaction of the character attribute values and combat system formulae.

I didn't know about the visual scripting stuff Fang, thanks; I'll check into that too.

A little bit late to this party, but I tend to think RPGMaker is exactly what you'd need. I spent about 40 hours with it a few years ago building out an RPG and found it easy enough to learn and pretty decent at spitting out a functional RPG.

In other news...

It appears Unity has just made all their Premium learning content free for ever, not just during the pandemic. This is EXCELLENT news. They have a lot of intermediate and advanced content that isn't readily available elsewhere. I'm SUPER EXCITED.

And as a quick update on my progress...

I've been doing pretty well at spending at least 30 minutes a day learning Unity in 2020. I've missed 12 days total since January, but have finished four "learning" games now. I'm currently enrolled in the C#/Unity Specialization at UofC Boulder, should finish up the first of five courses this weekend. The more I learn the more I feel like I need to learn, but I feel like I'm making steady progress.

Nice work!
That is some diligence that I only have in spurts ;p

Nice. Now that the Unity stuff is not under time pressure, I'll check it out.

Steam has IFAction Game Maker on sale for not that much off but it qualifies for the $5 off so I am going to pull the trigger.
The English tutorials are lagging (just released in English) but that should be corrected in the coming months. Apparently if you are familiar with RPGmaker you will pick up the workflow quickly.
It looks pretty feature rich and programming free:

Fascinating! I’ll take a look at that today.

That gets some strong reviews. Kind of an RPGMaker except easier and better. I'd be interested to hear what you think of it as you play around with it.

Don't have it in my budget to get it right now but it looks more diverse than RPGMaker. At the very least it could have a lot of utility as a simple prototyping tool for me. The description describes ACT and AVG games. Anyone know what those acronyms stand for?

Vector wrote:

Don't have it in my budget to get it right now but it looks more diverse than RPGMaker. At the very least it could have a lot of utility as a simple prototyping tool for me. The description describes ACT and AVG games. Anyone know what those acronyms stand for?

That's a good point about prototyping. I've also noticed as I've spent time learning Unity that learning how to build stuff technically is one half of the equation, and learning how to build engaging games is the other half. I think these tools that allow you to get into the game design aspect of game design quickly can be very helpful for refining game design skills. You can focus on building the game instead of learning how to use the software.

AVG = Adventure Games, maybe?
ACT = Action/Arcade Games, maybe?

That was my guess:
ACT = action (shooter and platformer examples - with quests and pickups mind you)
ARPG = obviously action rpg
AVG = adventure (in the fine print they mention AVG will be added mid 2020)

It seems to me like all the pieces for an adventure game are already there. Maybe they'll have a template that simplifies things.

It is extensible with javascript.
I was highly impressed that shooter presets like omni-directional and homing shots can be done with just a couple of clicks instead of having to code. Other things of note are things like minimaps, UI, inventory, health and title screen tools.

A couple of impressions on things I've bought during the steam sale.
Design Doll is amazing and does exactly what I want it to do. The saving and loading of customized presets makes a big difference. The import and export features work as expected as well. It exports the figure as its posed for bringing into other 3D content creation software. So I can send a dynamic pose to render elsewhere or I can send a neutral pose to rig and pose in the other software.

So that was a win (its not on steam unfortunately). Something I bought that is on steam did not fair so well. It is animation and rigging software called Akeytsu Indie. It was half off and looked like it had features I could exploit for my projects: simple posing, blend shapes to easily tweak facial expressions, and auto rigging to streamline that process. It has the potential to do all of that, unfortunately it bugginess gets in the way of its streamlining. So I didn't get the chance to test facial expressions because the autorigging required problematic weight painting. Akeytsu was awkward and unclear enough that I quit and asked for a refund.

Lastly, I did buy IFAction game maker and I can imagine RPGmaker being a lot like this. It provides templates for ACT (side scroller) and ARPG (4/8 way) games. It already lays out a lot for you. Opening a new ARPG project has the character setup and basic dimensions of a starter map. It allows you to paint tiles for the level and place barriers the character cannot cross. So right now I have resized the map so that the character can walk a few screens up and down and many more screens lengthwise. The game screen follows the character automatically which is nice since it is something that can be cumbersome in other game makers. I have not figured out how to move the player start and I have tried to drag built in enemies to the map but as soon as I click off them, they disappear. So my impressions are positive but I need to dig more into things like mouse click movement and importing my own assets. (looks really straightforward the way its laid out; you can just drag and drop sprites into each character direction) We will see how much coding is required and how much the built in stuff gets in the way if coding is required for my needs.

I returned IFAction Game Maker also. There is nothing wrong with it, it just doesn't fill enough of a gap in my game project needs to justify the purchase.

What I did do was buy Smile Game Builder for some very specific purposes. I didn't need to buy it but the discount was steep enough to almost impulse purchase. Plus with the refund from IFAction factoring in, I bought the bundle that includes the character builder (neat but don't really care) and the unity export which I care about very much.

The reason why the unity export is special is because it basically turns Smile Game Builder into a rapid level layout tool for Unity. At some point if Smile adds mouse or click movement, I may be able to skip even Unity for creating narrative adventure games. (Yes you can replace the blocky default graphics. Yes I will be doing that first thing) But I envision Smile being great for developing levels, gating, and basic interaction and event triggering. (perhaps even dialogue)

^Fangblackbone, have you looked at the Unity assets Adventure Creator or Fungus? I wonder if they might be what you’re looking for.

Wow yeah that exporter is regularly $80, now $16... so you're getting that 3d character editor for a dollar instead of 10 with the bundle. Jeez.

Not that I have any need for that. But it's interesting.

I don't know exactly how much of this I will use but udemy sent me a link to a sale price on their Build a Battle Royale and an RPG with Unity course series. It is 118 hours of video on a wide range of topics from C# (and R) programming to rigging a character in Blender for $10.

For $10 I think it is worth it just as a resource whether I follow the course step by step or not.

I am linking to udemy's unity page because it has lots of other interesting and cheap goodies there:
https://www.udemy.com/topic/unity/

Didn't realize RPG Maker MV was under $20 during the sale. Decided to jump in. I have a idea I want to test out and this is so good for demoing. Thinking of paying someone to help develop the script I want for the battle system.

Animation/posing with physics software cross posted from the Drawing thread:

I'm about to do this course on Unity 2D if anyone is interested in doing it along with me. We can chat about the lessons, help each other, etc etc.

https://www.udemy.com/share/101WjsCE...

For Cascadeur, if you just want to work with a human figure, do you have to build it in some other tool first? If so, what tool would be good?

That’s a very well done course. I finished up the second to last project in it about a month ago. You’ll learn a lot!

astralplaydoh wrote:

I'm about to do this course on Unity 2D if anyone is interested in doing it along with me. We can chat about the lessons, help each other, etc etc.

https://www.udemy.com/share/101WjsCE...

Didn't do that course but take in consideration that is built in Unity 2018, and as far as I know Unity made a lot of changes/improvements on 2D technology in 2019/2020 versions. I don't say it doesn't worth it, just take that in mind. Also, Unity premium is free and has A LOT of courses and tutorials.

For Cascadeur, if you just want to work with a human figure, do you have to build it in some other tool first? If so, what tool would be good?

No. They have a whole host of already setup sample characters: male, female, robot...

setrio wrote:
astralplaydoh wrote:

I'm about to do this course on Unity 2D if anyone is interested in doing it along with me. We can chat about the lessons, help each other, etc etc.

https://www.udemy.com/share/101WjsCE...

Didn't do that course but take in consideration that is built in Unity 2018, and as far as I know Unity made a lot of changes/improvements on 2D technology in 2019/2020 versions. I don't say it doesn't worth it, just take that in mind. Also, Unity premium is free and has A LOT of courses and tutorials.

I just completed everything except the last project in the course with the latest versions of Unity, and it all worked fine. I can't recall more than one or two minor spots where I had to look in the support forums, so I doubt you'll run into problems. The course developers have been very good about updating and tweaking content to keep it up to date.

Regarding Unity Premium, I was really excited about it when it went free, but I've spent time digging around in it and looking through things. For whatever reason, it just doesn't click for me. It feels like there is a lot of stuff, but it's not well calibrated and the quality and length varies significantly. I should go back and spend more time in it, but my first hour left me not as impressed as I was expecting to be.

I also feel like a lot of Unity Premium content is explained in ways that only make sense if you already know how to use Unity. For example, it'll explain a medium level concept but assume and not explain or teach connecting concepts that are either as complicated or more complicated than the one they are explaining. TL,DR: They strike me as people who know their stuff but aren't necessarily teachers.

Thanks Fang! Gonna have a look...

So I was looking up this and reached out to the developer if there would be a Windows version.
They got back to me with this, which looks like it has the building and shader hooks of PS4's Dreams but for Unity(Windows):