RPG Maker dev Degica has announced the release date for its latest game-making tool, Visual Novel Maker. It’s close, too. The tool will launch on Steam on November 16, only a few weeks away. Time to start thinking about that magical murder mystery set in a Japanese High School that I’ve always wanted to make. 

Like RPG Maker, Visual Novel Maker will contain a multitude of tools that will, hopefully, let you make the visual novel you’ve had bouncing around in your head, including free-to-use assets for characters, environments, music and sound effects. 

Here’s a summary of the features announced so far:

• Free assets
• Dynamic creation tools
• Live2D and voice sync support
• Scripting and extensions of user-integrated functionality
• Multiple resolution support
• Easy game localisation support
• Multiple exporting options 

Got any good ideas that you fancy turning into a visual novel? Share them in the comments so that I may steal them and finally become rich. 

RPG Maker has been used to make games as diverse as weird sidescroller LISA, heartbreaker To the Moon, and plenty of other games worth recommending. It gives users a basic scripting language, a map editor, and a combat editor with which they can create whatever they want. And yet, if you look into using it, you're bound to find people saying RPG Maker is a bad engine.

The truth is more complicated, and can only be understood by knowing the full history of RPG Maker. It's a 17-year odyssey, featuring dopey teenagers, mangled translations, cease-and-desist letters, and every known form of piracy. None of this was ever supposed to happen.

RPG Maker 95, 2000, and 2003

The RPG Maker series was created by Enterbrain, a division of Japanese company ASCII Corporation that initially had no interest in translating its product for a Western audience. But in 2000 a Russian student nicknamed 'Don Miguel' released a completely illegal and somewhat wonky English translation of RPG Maker 95/2000. It spread like wildfire.

RPG Maker was easy to use, and promised the opportunity to recreate, without coding, something akin to the glorious JRPGs of the SNES era. Flocks of teenagers downloaded the engine, dreaming of making the next Final Fantasy.

Being teenagers, many of those first users weren't skilled artists. They resorted to "ripping," taking graphical assets from commercial games and assembling them into spritesheets the engine could digest. They mixed and matched art from games like Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana, and Suikoden to create their own fantasy worlds.

It was completely illegal, of course, but the Internet at the time was still a wild, wild place, and at first nobody cared. Enterbrain eventually issued a cease-and-desist letter to Don Miguel, but it was too late: his creation was out of control. As he closed his own website dozens of others popped up. Further legal actions never managed to eradicate the problem. RPG Maker in English was here to stay.  

RPG Maker XP

In 2004 a new version of RPG Maker was released in Japan—and promptly cracked, translated, and released to the Western market by Don Miguel’s successor, 'RPG Advocate.'

RPG Maker XP featured a higher screen resolution, a shiny new map system, and most importantly, a scripting system. By tinkering with the base library, all written in Ruby, it was possible to change core functions or add new features to the games. If the library had documentation, though, it was never translated. 

The community faced a schism. Those who already had programming experience grasped the system; most others were left in the dark. But the good part of having an engine with so many pre-scripted features is that the code you write for your own game will probably work on someone else’s project.

"Scripters" began to release their work to the public: adding a fancy new menu to your game became only a matter of copy-pasting a few lines of code. New users joined forums looking for those assets and scripts, but remained for the company. Communities grew.

In 2005, the impossible happened: RPG Maker found an English publisher in Protexis. However, the people who already owned a pirated copy were unwilling to support the official version. After waiting for so long for an English release, many ignored Protexis's work. 

RPG Maker VX and VX Ace

Two years later, Protexis localized the newest version of the engine, RPG Maker VX. Unfortunately, it wasn’t very good. With a reduced resolution and a simplified map system it was seen by many as a step back. A newer version called RPG Maker VX Ace addressed those complaints, and Degica stepped in as the new publisher. 

Degica not only translated the engine, but made an effort to build a community around their product. RPG Maker finally had official forums, a support network, and someone willing to listen to the community and relay their feedback to the Japanese developers. Most importantly, Degica put the entire RPG Maker series on Steam, greatly increasing the engine’s popularity. But with new perks also came new rules.

No piracy, no ripping, no more fan games that used copyrighted material. The days of glory and plunder were over. It was time for the community to grow up—but a large part of the community was still not great at creating original art.

Degica published more art packs in the same style as their standard assets (also called Run Time Packages, or RTPs), and encouraged the community to make new assets using the same art style. The idea was to encourage the use of RTPs, building a free large library of tiles and characters available to everyone. It was a noble intent, but also produced an unfortunate side-effect.

Steam Greenlight and experimental games

The release of RPG Maker VX Ace coincided with the birth of Steam Greenlight. RPG Maker users started to consider themselves real game developers, and realized they could actually try to sell their games. The result? An explosion of RPG Maker games on Steam Greenlight, often made by teenagers with big dreams but limited skills. And all those games looked the same.

Players began to associate RPG Maker's RTPs with mediocre, "lazy" games. The engine got a bad reputation. In a 2016 Reddit thread about why people had begun to hate games made with RPG Maker a community manager who worked for Degica said, "I really wish people who weren't ready for the big time would stop submitting to greenlight. It would make my job easier. Because the perception of RM is already bad enough without people trying to throw their 10 minute effort game on greenlight."

On forums and in Steam user reviews the same comments about RPG Maker games recur over and over. They're "low effort and low quality," "look more or less identical," use the same "stock resources." It's enough to put you off using the engine entirely.

But outside of Steam, experimental RPG Maker games thrived. Artists with cool ideas but basic programming skills had found the perfect tool for them. Not interested in selling their products, they used RPG Maker to make weird games that reached cult status even outside the community. Japanese horror games like Yume Nikki and Corpse Party kickstarted an entire "horror RPG Maker games starring cute girls" movement. Other notable games include Space Funeral, Gingiva, Ib, Ao Oni, Oneshot, and OFF.

RPG Maker MV

In 2015 Degica published RPG Maker MV. The engine looked similar to the older versions, but had been completely rewritten in Javascript. New features included proper porting options, a debug console, and touch and mouse support.

After 20 years, RPG Maker was finally starting to resemble a proper game engine. It was a huge step forward. Though troubled by some serious bugs at release and a lack of documentation, it works well nowadays. In some corners of the internet that's never enough to repair a damaged reputation, however. 

 Comparing their Steam forums, the older engine has more discussion threads in every category except one—Tech Support, where the newer version has overtaken it handily. Two years after its release opinions are still divided. Some say the choice between MV and VX Ace comes down to which programming language you prefer, Ruby or Javascript, while for others it's about MV's ability to port to mobile versus the older engine's wealth of available assets. It's not a conversation that's likely to end any time soon. 

The future of RPG Maker

While RPG Maker’s community is pushing for more professional features, the developers themselves seem to consider the engine more of a toy than a proper engine, as the various console incarnations prove. We have to remember that RPG Maker is a Japanese engine at heart, and indie development is seen differently there.

Strangely enough, RPG Maker 2003 remains extremely popular, especially among Japanese developers. The limitations mimic those of a retro console, and help solo devs prevent overscoping their projects. The engine is still well supported, and even received some Steam updates this year. Vgperson’s translations website is the best resource about those new games made with this 14-year-old engine. 

Should you use RPG Maker? 

At this point you may be asking yourself, "Should I try RPG Maker after all? Should I give this much-maligned engine a chance?" If you're looking to make a professional game and actually sell it, probably not. It's still not a terribly good engine, and lacks many features its more professional counterparts like Unity and even GameMaker have. However, I think RPG Maker could be the perfect choice in some very particular cases.

• Returning devs: Maybe you fiddled with RPG Maker when you were a teen. Maybe you want to make games again, but don’t really know where to start. Rejoice! The engine works exactly like you remember, and the community is incredibly active and helpful. A small RPG Maker project can help you flex your muscles before tackling a more complex engine like Unity. 
• Artisans: By "artisans" I mean a very particular kind of game developers who like to focus on art and writing, and are making a game just because it’s the best medium to express the particular story they have in mind. They usually don’t have strong programming skills, nor do they care to—they just want to have characters walking around, some dialogue, and maybe some minigames or a battle here and there. If you fit this description, RPG Maker can take care of all your needs. 
• Children: Historically RPG Maker has done surprisingly well with the young. Give it to some bright kids, and they might well love it. RPG Maker's eventing system is much more complex than Game Maker’s drag-and-drop commands, and can teach them a great deal about programming logic while they have fun. 

And always remember: an engine is just an instrument. Sometimes a 'bad' engine can be exactly the right one for you.

Special thanks to community manager Archeia for advice and additional information.

Making games is hard. The more you know about the process, the more miraculous it seems that games get made at all. As former PC Gamer writer Tom Francis described programming when he was making Gunpoint: "The most useful way I've found to think of it is this: Your game is fucking insane. It is a mental patient. It has completely lost its mind, and to make it behave in any kind of reasonable way, you have to be expecting every sensible instruction to be met with screaming, preposterous bullshit."

While it's easy to feel paralyzed by the thought of learning to design and program your own game, we asked quite a few indie devs for their advice and they all offered the same advice for beginners: just do it. Jump in, no matter how scary it is. To help you take that first exhilarating (and inevitably frustrating—but also, probably, rewarding!) dive into game development, we've devised this handy list of 2D game engines for developers who are still new to programming. Paired with developer recommendations, hopefully this will serve as the push you need to get started.

GameMaker Studio 2

Price and License: $100 for permanent desktop license; Free trial availableBest for: Short-format 2D platformers and RPGs; cross-platform gamesNotable games: Nidhogg, Hyper Light Drifter, Undertale, Risk of Rain 

GameMaker Studio 2 is your one stop destination if you want to get into game development. The platform allows creators to use the tool's easy-to-learn drag-and-drop interface, or work hands-on with the engine's own scripting language, GML. We talked to several developers who've made popular games in GameMaker, who shared their own experiences with the tool.

The Pros

Mark Essen, creator of Nidhogg and Nidhogg 2, says GameMaker is great for beginners because scripting is pretty open-ended, and Yoyo Games has a wealth of tutorials and guides to help folks get set up quickly. A marketplace also offers add-ons to customize the engine to build a platformer or top-down RPG.

Alx Preston, the mind behind Hyper Light Drifter, says that the GameMaker community is a huge asset. He notes that young developers should be "...learning the best places to get support in the community and the best tricks to use for the engine to achieve what you want—usually by going to the community as a resource." 

The Cons

Of course, you might not be making a Steam-ready game right off the bat. "Because GameMaker is so forgiving with its code, projects can get messy very quickly," Essen says. "I like that in the beginning stages of a project you can iterate quickly and focus on the game design, but down the line this will bite you in the butt if you don't maintain some personal organizational standards!"

Duncan Drummond, the creator of beloved roguelike Risk of Rain, also noted that GameMaker's ease of use can come back to haunt developers. "It's very easy and fast to develop, but does come at a performance cost if done incorrectly," he says. Drummond also noted that GameMaker doesn't translate to any other engines, so if you're looking to make the jump to Unity or another engine down the line, this might not be the tool for you.

Beginner's Advice

"Don't forget to delete your work! Starting over frequently is a great way to work your design muscles." — Mark Essen, Nidhogg

"Get started! Get involved, get as much help as you can. Just make work, even if it's bad. The more mistakes you make the more you'll learn." — Alx Preston, Hyper Light Drifter 

"Just start! It's fun and relatively easy—and doesn't really cost you much but time." — Duncan Drummond, Risk of Rain

Unity

Price and License: Beginner's package is free, $35/month for Unity Plus, $125/month for Unity ProBest for: Pretty much everything indieNotable games: Ori and the Blind Forest, Galak-Z, West of Loathing, Cuphead

Unity is one of the main platforms for popular indie games, and while it has impressive 3D capabilities, there are dozens of fantastic 2D games built in the engine, too. Unity has more of a learning curve than the other engines on this list, but with a huge community and bountiful tutorials, there are more than enough resources out there to get you off to a solid start.

Unity's asset store also includes a wealth of add-ons that customize the engine for 2D development. There's Unity's free 2D Platformer asset, and tools like Corgi Engine and Rex Engine, which offer platforming physics, controls and abilities out of the box.

We spoke to both inkle's Joseph Humfrey and Asymmetric Publications' Victor Thompson about jumping into Unity as a new programmer. 

The Pros

Thompson may have been used to making games the old-fashioned way, but has quickly grown to be a fan of Unity, the engine he used to create the team's latest game, West of Loathing. "After 2-3 years of using it full time, the most exciting thing for me is how quickly you can put together concepts and prototypes," he says. "Despite having used many engines, both small and simple for personal projects as well as big and complex in the AAA industry, Unity is by far the best designed engine I've ever used, and allows me to be the most productive I've ever been."

The Cons 

However, there are some limitations when using a single platform for all of your development needs. If you encounter a bug in Unity, you're often at the mercy of the engine's designers to fix the problem, which can involve some waiting. "Despite publicly saying that they've put bug fixing at the top of their list of priorities, we still find editor and debugger stability a big problem at inkle," Humfrey says. 

Beginner's Advice

"Whatever it is you want to do, try to shape it in your head as a thing you want to make, rather than a skill you want to have. It's useful and rewarding to know how to do things, but in the long term I think people get more out of setting a goal, learning the things that they need in order to achieve that goal, and then reaching the goal." — Victor Thompson, West of Loathing

Ren'Py

Price and License: FreeBest for: 2D Visual Novels, SimulationCompatible with: PythonNotable games: Long Live the Queen, Analogue: A Hate Story

Ren’Py is an easy-to-learn open source engine. While the tool does require some programming, you really only need to know how to use a text-editor and photo editing software to get started. It’s a useful gateway to Python for newcomers.

Here’s what Georgina Bensley, creator of Long Live the Queen, had to say about Ren’py. 

The Pros

"Ren'Py is open source and cross-platform, which opens up a broad range of opportunities for dedicated users," Bensley says. "I also consider it a plus that it is beginner-friendly but still requires looking at and editing script files, rather than a graphical drag-and-drop interface, because I think it's useful to get people over that hurdle of thinking that code is scary."

Ren’Py is also a good tool if you feel overwhelmed by the sheer prospect of building a game from scratch: "One of the biggest roadblocks faced by people who've never made any sort of game before is simply the belief that coding is 'too complicated' and not something that they would be able to do. Being able to get a simple game up and running quickly helps get new developers over that hurdle, even if visual novels are not something they intend to make in the future. Once you've made something that other people can play, even something simple, it can change the way you feel about yourself and your ability to do things."

The Cons 

Ren’Py is a bit limited in support for graphical and mechanical features. If you’re looking to create games with 3D, Live2D, collision detection and other bells and whistles, you might want to look elsewhere before getting started. 

Beginner’s Advice

"Don't be afraid to try, it's easier to get started than you think. Don't be afraid to ask for help, there are a lot of other people out there who have been where you are and can offer tips, or who are looking for projects themselves and might want to join you. Don't assume that something is impossible until you've at least talked about it."

ink

Price and License: FreeBest for: Text-based adventure games Compatible with: Unity, C#, HTMLNotable games: 80 Days, Sorcery! 

ink is a good, free supplement to Unity if you're seeking an easy way to write branching dialogue and narratives. It's easy to learn, using markup instead of script, and it integrates with Unity smoothly thanks to the engine's built-in integration. ink was built as "middleware," according to inkle's Art and Code Director Joseph Humfrey—after writing an ink script, it's expected you'll plug it into a larger game within Unity. However, developers are also welcome to use the Inky Editor to export a game to the web.  

The Pros

Writing extensive narrative with branching paths can get messy, so ink is an excellent tool to ensure you don't get lost along the way. "This allows writers to use Inky to write their dialogue and narrative text in a format that's a lightweight interactive markup," Humfrey says. "The ink engine running within Unity can then read these scripts, and produce text that can be presented by the game."

Its open nature also comes in handy when creating more ambitious projects. Humfrey notes, "The text that's produced by the ink engine doesn't even necessarily need to be presented literally. For example, in Heaven's Vault, the ink engine produces a dynamic film script that's interpreted by the game and presented more like an interactive graphic novel or adventure game." 

ink also happens to be a great tool for people who are more interested in writing stories for games, as opposed to pure programming. "...There are increasingly a lot of interactive writers who have been using ink," Humfrey adds. "Where The Water Tastes Like Wine is a game by one of the makers of Gone Home and is using ink. It has a large team of well known writers including Leigh Alexander, Emily Short and Cara Ellison. So increasingly, if you're a writer interested in game development, ink could be a good way to get started."

The Cons 

ink is best used to complement games made within Unity, rather than as a standalone engine. Humfrey says, "ink isn't an alternative to Unity—it's complementary. In fact, ink is one of the only interactive fiction authoring languages that was specifically designed as middleware." 

Beginner's Advice

"The most common advice is that you should make a demo game, and I still believe that to be best advice. For artists, make sure you've got an awesome portfolio that shows what you're good at, and hides what you're not good at—only show your best stuff. So, get out there and make stuff!"