https://www.pcgamer.com/games/rpg/in-its-first-major-visual-overhaul-ever-rpg-ma...
I heard the newest version of RPG Maker is going to support 2.5D graphics like Octopath Traveller. Definitely too late for CS:3 but how viable is that for future games?
I can understand the enthusiasm, but, as they say, big no from me. Allow me to explain.
I show my age here, but anyone remember a game called SimCopter? No? Ok then. How about SimCity? Biiig popular game in the 90s, early 00s. Top-down, 2d/isometric sprite layout, managing a city. Crucially, everything was laid out in tiles and with pre-defined sprites for everything. So as basic 3d became possible on consumer PCs, someone thought "Hey, what if we just made a 3d model for every tile in the game, and made some code to populate a 3d map with those tiles, in the same layout they were in a given 2d map? And then you could like...explore it in 3d and stuff!" And so they did, both in SimCopter, and in Sim...driver? Some car game. You could take your existing Simcity 2d maps, drop them into these games, and drive or fly around them in primitive 3d. VERY buggy, but a lot of fun for the time.
RPGMaker has actually had a system like this for some time: take existing tiles, make 3d models, use the map file as an guide to arrange these models in a 3d space. The only real new thing in the system described in the article seems to be the...presentation of the 3d models? The style? But "3d RPGMaker!" has been a thing for years now.
However, the keen-brained among you may have already picked up the problem with this system:
1. It requires a 3d model for EACH tile
2. 3d models are orders of magnitude harder to create and modify than 2d sprites.
Thus, a system like this is fine and dandy as long as you're sticking to default sprites and tiles, but utterly falls apart as soon as you try to customize anything, because you're on the hook for making all the new 3d models. Now, details are scarce here: To be fair, it COULD be that the models are generated by the system itself automatically based on some internal ruleset (walls all look like THIS, player sprites all look like THIS, etc, with the textures grabbed directly from the 2d character and tilesheets.) The previous plugin that ALREADY EXISTED seems to work like this. But that seems...less than ideal, as, just as an example, said sheets are far too low resolution to look good on a 3d model, even a "low poly" one.
About 75% of the tile and sprite work in Chapter 3 is non-default. Mostly made by others, used with permission or bought, but a few hand-crafted myself. This takes some work, but that's mostly down to mixing and matching tilesheets, which amounts to editing image files on a grid. That takes some time, but it's not all that complicated. There is no way on earth I could make even simple matching 3d models (And matching textures!) for all these tiles and sprites. If everything is auto-generated, great, but that's likely still going to require more work to make the system happy, and leads into another problem:
3d is an entirely different design language than 2d. You can see developers discovering this in the early days of the n64 and ps1. You design differently for 3d than you do for 2d, it's not something that can be simply translated, because something is lost in that translation. You have to play to the strengths of having that 3d space, and the limitations, and if you do, that's a LOT more effort and time. When I started considering making games, I very deliberately went with 2d because the workload for even a simple 3d game is insane. There would be no time or energy left to build out something with fun space and detail and function. You can see this in the history of professional games: back in the early days, it wasn't uncommon for a game to be made by 1-5 people. That grew to 20 or so by the SNES era, and now it's HUNDREDS. It pays to keep the scope simple.
I don't mean to crap on people's enthusiasm, I can see it looking neat at first. But it PROBABLY (though maybe not!) involves more work, and I think, as presented, it would get old fast, and not really work with the mechanics of the game as such. How do you dodge chasing enemies, for example, when your camera is so low to the ground like that? Everything is obscured by a building.
P.S. I hate journalists so, SO much. This is not RPGMaker's "first major visual overhaul ever". RPG Tsukūru Dante 98 came out in 1992 for the NEC PC-9800. I'm willing to bet things have PROGRESSED a little since then visually. Even the difference between RPGMaker 2000 and VX Ace were pretty significant compared to MV (as I'm reminded every time I find a neat tilesheet only to discover I can't use it because it's the GODDAMN VX RESOLUTION). But no, you're right PCGamer, this 3d trick that has existed since 2019 is totally unprecedented.
Probably not. That massive book I wrote aside, I'm just not a fan of the style. If I had a bunch of people and money to work with, I'd probably put it toward:
1. Faster production of what I make now.
2. Higher quality of what I make now.
3. Parallel production (more than one thing cooking at a time, although this may just be a version of #1.
4. Possibly exploration of simple 3d games, playing to the strengths of the medium.
5. Some limited degree of merchandise.
Posters are another possibility, and high probability if I do anything because it's fairly simple to do and has a high likelihood of having room for a decent profit margin. As far as sex toys go, especially fuckable ones, my feeling is that they tend to be very expensive for something that wears out fairly quickly. As with the games themselves, I'd want to sell stuff (at least for the first few items) that was fairly accessible to people budget-wise. Also less health/safety concerns: I'd have to be REAL careful if I was selling toys that they were actual quality material and not contaminated with some shit.
I've seen artists who've done collabs with sex toy companies with their characters like Braeburned and Twin Tail Creations. I don't know what the revenue sharing is like though. I remember one artist saying they got approached to do this once and all they would have gotten is a free copy of the toy? Which is neat but not exactly a great deal.
