# I single-handedly built my own RPG Maker. But the one I use today wasn’t my first attempt. I toyed with the idea for many years with a bunch of experiments while I was still figuring out Flash.
#Flash Yipe (2002)
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I think I first started out with Macromedia Flash version 4, so that’s probably what I used to make this. Which means this was programmed in ActionScript 1 baby! Oh yeah… look at that naive janky code directly accessing everything from everything else. This was around the same time I was making my
Guardia Forest
game, but this experiment was a lot more elaborate. I was trying to figure out how to switch between maps. So I stole the maps and menus from The Quest of Yipe III.
#Addressing the Yipe in the Room (1998)
# One of the very first games I ever modded was The Quest of Yipe III for the classic Macintosh. The game originally looked like this.
# It helps when the computer comes with a built-in graphical program editor.
# And what happens when a horny 14 year old gets ahold of such power in 1998? … this happens.
# I get nostalgic, which is why you sometimes see these maps in my games.
#Illusion of Gaia Parody (2006)
# Fast forward to 2006 and I’m in college. By this point I had moved on to my beloved Macromedia Flash 8 that I still use to this very day. I briefly toyed around with the idea of making a silly parody of Illusion of Gaia in Flash. This gave me a better grasp of how to handle scrolling and collision, and a better sense of how to organize things.
#RPG Modules (2007)
# After playing with RPG Maker 2003 for almost 8 years, I was starting to get tired of its limitations. So I was exploring ways to make games in Flash instead. I was also getting smarter about programming and tried to divide things up into these separate reusable modules.
#Flash Scenario Maker (2008)
# One of my favorite things to do in RPG Maker 2003 was making self-playing stories. So I tried making a scenario maker in Flash. This was actually two programs. A map editor and an event editor. I also discovered a program called Zinc that could turn Flash programs into Windows programs with the ability to save files.
# These got my feet wet with reusable code, scripting, loading files, and turning everything into a self-contained game. All of my early flash stories from before 2010 were created this way.
#Early Games (2009)
# I then expanded on this idea with a new script editor that could directly generate ActionScript code. All I had to do was paste the result directly into Flash, inside the character’s movieClip object to make them perform those actions. This created extremely small and efficient games, but testing any changes required me to re-compile the game every time, which could take 5 minutes for complex games like Pokemon.
# You can hear me talk about the process in this video.
#RPG Maker (2010)
# I got fed up with compiling over and over and waiting for it each time. But then I realized it would be much faster to test games if they could just read external files while I’m editing them, and later I can import all the files into the game after it’s done. So I started a new game editor. It took 5 months to create the map editor, collision editor, and sprite placement editor. It can load new editors on-the-fly to edit each kind of sprite. So I spent another month creating one for RPG sprites. That transformed this general-purpose game editor into an RPG Maker. Over the years I’ve added more features and revised the code a few times, but this is the editor I still use to this very day. It’s also the one I include with all of my games.
# Not many people know this, but this can edit other kinds of games too.
#A Minimal Experiment (2012)
# Now let me tell you a crazy story. A couple years later there was one month in 2012 where our house had no power. So my mother and I spent the month at my aunt’s place. There was no room there to take my whole desktop computer with me, so what I brought with me was my PSP, a very cheap tablet running Android 2.3, and a USB keyboard. My mother brought her Macintosh desktop with her because she was addicted to Diablo 2 and played it almost 24/7.
# So here’s what I did. I set up a Virtual PC emulator on her computer running invisibly in the background with Windows XP. The Macintosh had a 4-core CPU and Windows XP only uses 1 core, so she never noticed any slow-down. Meanwhile I would use VNC on my tablet to remotely control Windows XP on her computer while she was using the Macintosh side, allowing us both to use the computer at the same time. So I spent a week programming a simple scenario maker in Flash remotely on a tablet.
# The Flash editor I created could run directly on my Android tablet inside a web browser called Dolphin. Back then Flash was so widespread that even the cheapest Android devices had it.
# I would hook up the USB keyboard to the tablet. Then I would create a scenario using 8 simple commands. map, appear, anim, look, pose, move, talk, and wait. I could tap the button in the middle to watch the story play on the right and test things as I went.
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Meanwhile my PSP had pictures of all my pre-made maps with a labelled grid to help me figure out character movements.
# When I was done making a scene I would tap the “Copy” button, switch to an android text editor, paste, and save a text file. If I wanted to continue editing the scene later I could just type the filename of the text file into my flash editor and it would load it.
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The only reason I was able to pull this off was because I had used RPG Maker 2000 for so many years that I intuitively knew all of the commands that I didn’t need. I could focus on only the features that mattered. The bare minimum. This was how I originally created the
Kara's Puberty
story.
