With Godot hitting its stride as a popular option for Game Development, a couple of thoughts have crossed my mind coming from other Game Development communities. Let’s take a deep dive into what that means.
With Godot being completely open-source, meaning it can be used for a variety of games completely free, furthermore, it’s one of the most extendable and documented editors that I’ve seen coming from Unity and RPGMakerMV. With that in mind, I see potential that I always wanted to bring to users in the RPGMaker community and for my games.
Plugin Limitations
As a game dev one of my main activities has been creating tools and plugins in the RPGMakerMV community. I was also an advocate for more advanced features in RPGMakerMV as well. But, there was one issue.
Within RPGMakerMV the way the engine was setup prevented the developer from extending the editor. There was a limit to the ways you could modify the user experience to make creating your game an enjoyable experience for developers. Let me explain what I mean in a bit more detail.
Plugins in RPGMakerMV are great for extending the way the engine works within the confines of your game world and how the RPG features works, but you couldn’t easily modify the editor for creating that game world. The result was we ended up creating complex UIs and external tools that had to be leveraged through text to work around the limitations of the editor.
I believe Godot can change things.
Open Source RPG Features
I believe with Godot we can now start circumventing that issue and create the right UI/UX experience for developers to make the best games that they can and the functionality needed to create RPGs that they want in more game styles.
By leveraging the Godot game editor and the extensibility we can start creating plugins similar to the ones in RPGMakerMV for Godot games. The most important thing is that we create a way to replicate the most standard RPG features such as switches, databases, and more. In my opinion, once we have these key elements we can start better blending styles of games. Now, that leads me to an important point about many RPGMakerMV games out there that people are making.
Game Styles
In RPGMakerMV, there is primarily one style; top-down 2D similar to Final Fantasy 6. However, I saw many game developers mixing the styles that came out of the box for the editor. The result was that many plugin developers created features that did not exist within RPGMakerMV while also circumventing the limitations of the editor itself to make it happen.
For example, one person wanted a top-down RPG with a grid-inventory system and a tactical battle system. To do that in RPGMakerMV, you’d need at least three plugins and you’d also have to figure out how to make each one of them work together. I believe Godot can help us better achieve this meshing of game styles because we make no assumptions on what the user wants in their game upfront.
I know I’ll be working within Godot going forward to create my own games and bringing tools to the game engine to make it better.
With that said, keep on game making!
Recent Comments