Structuring a larger game project in RPG Maker - Part 1, “Understanding the Problem”

Today we’re going to look at something that I hope will be useful for you guys who are just emerging from doing tutorials to starting to plan your "full games". This approach could also apply to most narrative-based indie games, like visual novels or pretty much anything else.

Years ago, when I made my first ever game in BASIC, back in the late 80s, I ran into a problem:

I was up to the ~tenth location in my indie adventure game, and in truth, it was starting to become a mess. I had tons of switches, variables and such that save character presence and positions, as well as the things with which the player had interacted, and it was very difficult to remember what-controlled-what.

What’s worse is that to test some parts of my game, I had to either use the save/load system (which was not be reliable with all the changes I was making) or I had to play my game each time from the start... Which became a problem once my game was over 20 minutes’ long.

I ended up just trying to “wing it”; I didn't test, my game got worse, and before I knew it, I had something which was less like a clean project, and more like this:

Has that ever happened to you? If so, then hopefully what I’m going to say in these articles will be of some help to you. 

One of the things you notice, when you’ve been in the RPG Maker or indie development communities for a while, is how game creation tends to involve a series of gateways. The first one is simply getting something, anything, onscreen - a short step for RPG Maker, Unity or other engines, a longer step if you’re learning how to program from scratch. Still, most dedicated people reach this point.

After this, most people look at tutorials, and they manage to make some simple, 1-room or 1-screen games, and build from there. However, the next gate comes when you want to go from those simpler games to something more elaborate, with a large number of locations and events - and speaking personally, I started to falter at this stage. I knew the tools, but didn't understand how to apply them to a larger-scale project.

Perhaps you’ve struggled with this yourself. In RPG terms it’s a pretty tricky early boss to slay.

This “gateway” is the barrier between a simple project and a more complex one, and can be a bit of a dark art.

I'm going to show you guys how I learned to get over this problem, I’m relatively new to RPG Maker, but principles I’m going to describe are quite universal and could be used to structure narrative experiences for most games.

When this comes up in development circles, often people say “you just need to plan your work in advance”, which is fine - but planning is only helpful if you know what you’re doing. Put simply, you don’t need to plan more; you need to plan better.

So taking the paragraph above, I'm going to break down the problems I faced, and will explain how I got over each.

1. It’s difficult to test a longer game. I needed to create a system which was easy to test; this is because a working, robust game is always preferable to a buggy one. Ultimately I just needed to make this easier for myself.
2. Problems in parts of my game broke other parts. These are called “dependencies”, and I needed to remove them. Ideally, as much of your game needs to be independent from the rest as possible.
3. Losing track of what switches/variables affect what else. Sometimes this is just about having good names, but also, it’s about having more elements depend on fewer variables, in a better-planned manner (this will be expanded on later).

In this series of guides, I’m going to talk about the ways I went about fixing this, and if you've had these problems, hopefully they can help you. This isn’t a guide for programmers as such, but I will touch on some programming concepts that I’ll hopefully explain well-enough for newcomers to game development - but let me know in the comments if you struggle to understand anything.

So, we’re gonna start next week with a brief explanation of a vital software development concept which is useful in-games - the state-machine.

Going to try and make these weekly updates, so follow me if you want to be first to read them!