• General Chat

  • Seasoned programmer here. Should I use RPGMaker or Godot for a JRPG?

I've seen several tutorials I can borrow from for Godot, such as JRPG combat, and visual novel text boxes, etc. However, RPGMaker is definitely a more cohesive product for making JRPGs. The only problem is I heard you can barely customize it and drag-and-dropping kind of coding disgusts me. But then again, if you can drag and drop map tiles to design maps in RPGMaker and have all the save/load stuff handled for you, that seems easier than in Godot where I assume you'd have to populate 2D arrays with map tile type IDs manually without a visual reference? And the save/loads I assume you'd also have to track the state of everything manually? That wouldn't be too hard, just a pain probably.

Any advice? Been coding for 10 years now, so this question is coming from a different angle than the typical "no programming experience which should I choose" question. Still, I have very little gamedev experience.

Please don't include potentially seizure-inducing GIFs in posts. I edited your post to remove it.

I recommend Godot for some reasons; MIT license, full source code, flexible. The other program sounds like it's specific genere. No options there, no customizing game play. It's static.

I've been using Godot and it's really great Game Engine, after getting past the learning curve. It's in competition with Unity3D. Soon will be even better after version 4.0 released. Long time for version 4.0

It has limits, but I think the other program has limits which are worse. the other program was designed for no coders I think. Godot certainly needs programming skills to use it.

RPGMaker would be easier, but it really limits your creativity. I've played some RPGM games, and they all look the same, I don't buy them anymore because they just feel like cookie-cutter mods and not full games. With Godot you can customize everything and get it very unique for your idea. But it will be more work.

If you already have a third party library or can supply your own art assets, I'd say to use Godot so you can expand on what you'll already know for different projects. If the bundled art and character generator will be the key factor between getting to completion and sputtering out over having to do (or get a collaborator to do, or commission someone to do) that much more stuff, use RPGMaker, because one finished game is worth more than a dozen cool ideas and demos.

As for making maps in Godot, I'm fairly sure I've seen tutorial videos about painting them visibly onto a grid, but lacking any interest in 2d games I didn't pay much attention.

@supercow297 said: Been coding for 10 years now

Coding for 10 years? Godot

Obviously not, context implied is that they have general coding experience prior to godot use/game development.