Live data from Hacker News

RPG in a Box

rpginabox.com

71–80 of 85 posts

Re: RPG in a Box

#71
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I give short talks at schools about game dev I try to make it super clear that we are all born game designers. We all make up games as children and a large part of that is story telling. Every child has seen a face in a cloud and 'designed' something outside of themselves. This is where teachers are amazing. Teachers know how to nurture that against the pressure of society crushing it. It was python+pygame that…

"Every child has seen a face in a cloud and 'designed' something outside of themselves. This is where teachers are amazing." Hm. My teachers rather stopped me from looking outside the window to see faces in the clouds and placed me on a seat far away from any window so I could fully focus on the less interesting topics at hand, that society demands that I know. (Yet when I was succesfully done with all that schools,…

There is a middle school in my town that was built with no windows, in the 1970s. For this innovation, it won a design award. The roof leaks terribly.

Re: RPG in a Box

#72

Inventing your own programming language for your personal project is a TERRIBLE idea, and will likely doom the project in the long run. Languages require a huge amount of support, and you're going to be way too busy building an RPG maker to properly support a whole language. That means you're just going to wind up with a shitty unsupported custom language no one wants or knows how to use.

Terrible idea how so? You just said it's a personal project. What's the harm in learning and doing what you want? :)

Re: RPG in a Box

#73

Inventing your own programming language for your personal project is a TERRIBLE idea, and will likely doom the project in the long run. Languages require a huge amount of support, and you're going to be way too busy building an RPG maker to properly support a whole language. That means you're just going to wind up with a shitty unsupported custom language no one wants or knows how to use.

> Inventing your own programming language for your personal project is a TERRIBLE idea, and will likely doom the project in the long run.

It's something that everyone should do at least once, ideally on a hobby project where it wouldn't be that hard to rip it back out if needed.

Re: RPG in a Box

#74

Inventing your own programming language for your personal project is a TERRIBLE idea, and will likely doom the project in the long run. Languages require a huge amount of support, and you're going to be way too busy building an RPG maker to properly support a whole language. That means you're just going to wind up with a shitty unsupported custom language no one wants or knows how to use.

Wouldn't Lua be the classic/obvious choice for this application since it has such inertia [1]? I remember RPG Maker supporting Ruby back in the day but a lot has changed in the past 20 years... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Lua_(programming_lang...

In a better universe Godot went with Lua instead of GDScript.

Re: RPG in a Box

#76
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blender had moderate success when it was closed source, but not enough to pay its development, so it was going to die. After its creator raised €100,000 to release it under the GPL, Blender became the leading open-source 3D tool it is today. And they make enough money from recurring donations, service subscriptions, merchandise, conferences and trainings.

I think Blender was (and still is) exceptionally good at community building. Just freeing your product might not get you enough traction by itself.

Blender itself is also over 20 years old. And it struggled a lot even when opt source until several things came together at once. A mix of a UX overhaul, autodesk pissing off the community, and outreach yielding fruit as corporations experimented with adoption.

I'm not sure if we had that perfect storm in game engines yet. Unity fumbled big time, but Godot wasn't quite mature enough to fully take advantage of that opportunity.

Re: RPG in a Box

#77
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Every child has seen a face in a cloud and 'designed' something outside of themselves. This is where teachers are amazing." Hm. My teachers rather stopped me from looking outside the window to see faces in the clouds and placed me on a seat far away from any window so I could fully focus on the less interesting topics at hand, that society demands that I know. (Yet when I was succesfully done with all that schools,…

There is a middle school in my town that was built with no windows, in the 1970s. For this innovation, it won a design award. The roof leaks terribly.

Sounds like Smithsburg Middle School in Maryland.

Re: RPG in a Box

#78
post #40

My first thought on seeing the RPG in a Box homepage is that the graphics don't really do anything for me. Maybe it's just nostalgia having grown up playing Final Fantasy games for SNES, but when it comes to graphically simple games, I find that pixel art graphics resonate much more with me. So I would probably lean more toward RPG maker if I wanted to make an RPG. But then I had a look at the community showcase [1],…

> it's just nostalgia having grown up playing Final Fantasy games for SNES What did Nintendo do to you people? I've grown up playing very pixelated games on the ZX Spectrum but I have zero nostalgia for those graphics.

Final Fantasy IV and VI, Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana, Ogre Battle, and Zelda: A Link to the Past all still look great to me to this day. I think it's just a timeless art style. And it's not all just nostalgia, the early 3d games which came in the next generation of consoles, and which I probably spent even more time playing, all look like trash to me.

Re: RPG in a Box

#79
post #55
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s because the art for these games was so good, it didn’t feel like the hardware was a limitation, more like it just had a particular style. I’m currently playing Octopath Traveler 2 and it completely recreates this feeling, the art is beautiful and very pixelated.

Well, at least the Nintendo nostalgia is saving me money since I can't even look at fake pixelated graphics when I look for new indie games to play. This is not the only way to do low budget graphics. Too bad very few creators realize it.

What are some other techniques you’ve noticed?
Post reply on HN