The Musings Of The Consensus

I've been following the news of late that RPG Maker MZ will release this summer, and while I'm mostly happy, as I had a few projects in RPG Maker MV I backburnered due to issues with it I hope MZ will address, the news so far is generally good, here are the highlights. 1. Codebase is still Javascript, but apparently, they rewrote the backend code quite a bit. Given JS could drool on good computers due to bad optimization, hopefully, this will ameliorate that. 2. Ships with a crapload of resources and are generally compatible with MV stuff out of the box. I can live with that. 3. Includes a lot of features to make it easier on noobs and lots of shortcuts for things like pathfinding for cutscenes, Good stuff here. 4. LAYERS. As in XP style stuff so you don't have to do complicated hacks to do things like being able to walk under bridges. Definitely a good thing. 5. Now added Active Time Battle as a default battle engine. Good deal. 6. Effeskeer powered particle-ba...

Since the pandemic has forced everyone to find something to fill spare time with, I decided to seriously buckle down and make a game in RPG Maker MV. I had a few false starts, the superficial stuff is largely similar to the previous makers, but I mostly had to adjust to using Javascript for code, not Ruby. In terms of ease of use, I find both Ruby and Javascript quite human-readable, but they still feel like the difference between reading a physical book and reading an e-book. Both are easy to do, but there are minor differences that make the experience feel much different in actual practice. I must admit I both like and detest how scripts are organized in MV. Unlike previous makers, they are plug and play instead of you having to copy-paste the Ruby code. This means it's less tedious to just add JS scripts, but the interface for organizing is not as easy to navigate as prior makers. Regardless, it's much easier to just enable and disable certain scripts, so I can live wi...