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], and it's really impressive what people are doing. I've played a lot of Minecraft, and have experienced genuine awe and terror in those environments. And some of the community showcase screenshots definitely give me that same immersive feeling that I get in Minecraft, and which pixel art games don't really offer.
I just had a look in the forums and it looks like you can do pixel art games in this engine, too. [2]
So I guess my advice is to maybe highlight more of the community creations on the homepage as well as first-person worlds.
Anyway, any tool that encourages and enables creativity is awesome. This is very cool!
>So I would probably lean more toward RPG maker if I wanted to make an RPG
That may be a part of why they chose to take a 3d approach instead. RPG Maker has 20 years of iteration, so it's pretty hard to compete in that space. It's already a bit difficult as is to stand out in a 2D space to begin with.
Meanwhile, 3D is still a hard problem and Voxels give that flexibility to make assets by hand that fit into an overall game.
Five megabytes for the acorn64 rotating box, because it’s a GIF. And a bad GIF that can’t play at its intended speed for most of its rotation, and so has speed jitters (without delving: I presume it’s due to format limitations, as it looks to be using more than 256 colours; see also https://www.biphelps.com/blog/The-Fastest-GIF-Does-Not-Exist). Ugh. `ffmpeg -i acorn64.gif acorn64.mp4` shrinks it to under 350kB, looking about the same except that it now plays smoothly. And will use a lot less power.
(I noticed this because the page was loading unreasonably slowly for unclear reasons. In cases like this, a GIF <img> has a worse failure mode than <video>.)
Seeing stuff like this makes me so excited! Partly because I love game engines and making games, and partly because it becomes more evidence to me that programmers will really like my project when I finally release it! Hopefully next Monday!
90s_dev 4 hours ago [-]
If the author is here:
> It's similar to some other languages, like Lua, and is very easy to pick up if you have knowledge of basic programming concepts.
Why not just use Lua or one of the forks like Luau?
tosmatos 1 hours ago [-]
I'd thought they would keep GDScript since it's built on Godot, especially since you can export your projects to Godot afterwards. Not really that bad of a problem since GDScript's easy to pick up
qmr 2 hours ago [-]
I wonder how it compares to RPGMaker.
deafpolygon 2 hours ago [-]
They should take advantage of viral marketing: "I heard you like game engines, so here's a game engine in a game engine."
kace91 45 minutes ago [-]
Sorry to be the one to tell you, but that meme is at this point older than many gamers themselves.
But then I had a look at the community showcase [1], and it's really impressive what people are doing. I've played a lot of Minecraft, and have experienced genuine awe and terror in those environments. And some of the community showcase screenshots definitely give me that same immersive feeling that I get in Minecraft, and which pixel art games don't really offer.
I just had a look in the forums and it looks like you can do pixel art games in this engine, too. [2]
So I guess my advice is to maybe highlight more of the community creations on the homepage as well as first-person worlds.
Anyway, any tool that encourages and enables creativity is awesome. This is very cool!
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/rpginabox/comments/1hqx3h4/im_so_gr...
[2] https://rpginabox.com/forum/d/547-the-twilight-isle/8
That may be a part of why they chose to take a 3d approach instead. RPG Maker has 20 years of iteration, so it's pretty hard to compete in that space. It's already a bit difficult as is to stand out in a 2D space to begin with.
Meanwhile, 3D is still a hard problem and Voxels give that flexibility to make assets by hand that fit into an overall game.
(I noticed this because the page was loading unreasonably slowly for unclear reasons. In cases like this, a GIF <img> has a worse failure mode than <video>.)
RPG in a Box: A grid-based, voxel-style game engine built on Godot - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37502218 - Sept 2023 (21 comments)
> It's similar to some other languages, like Lua, and is very easy to pick up if you have knowledge of basic programming concepts.
Why not just use Lua or one of the forks like Luau?