Of all the proprietary programs I use, there are very few that I use willingly. Chief among them is RPG Maker MZ. It is a Japanese game engine designed to make traditional JRPGs, but can be extended to do almost any 2D topdown game you could want to make (technically you can even do 3D, but then you will not be doing much with the native editor). You’ve probably seen a lot of games made with one version of RPG Maker or another and many aren’t that good, but that is a testament to just how easy it is to get started making games with this tool.

I’m not going to dive deep into anything here or give you a full history of the RPG Maker series today, just gush about how much I love this game engine and provide some resources to help you get started.

Backstory

RPG Maker wasn’t my first game engine, that title goes to a very simple game engine for making FPS games that I can’t remember the name of. It didn’t have many features and I don’t think there was a way to add new ones, it was targeted squarely at making very simple shooters. It sucked and was not very fun, but really got me thinking about making a video game. One day a friend of mine shared with me a less than legal copy of RPG Maker XP and I was instantly hooked.

I didn’t read the manual or look at tutorials at first, make a little game with the default assets where my little sister was the demonic boss monster. I didn’t know much about the engine and it was garbage, but it was a fun experience. I didn’t know how conditional branches worked, how to use the editors layer system for mapping (every tree in my first game had a black square behind it), or much of anything else. There was a small quest to kill the boss with some mobs, a store, and a little text. It was enough though to tell people I made a game.

I eventually learned the basics, made a small project using tutorials from a now nonexistent website, and even started adding community scripts like an action battle system for making action RPGs. I even shared screenshots on my first website when I built something small, but coherent enough to be playable.

Then I got my first RPG Maker I (my dad really) actually paid for, RPG Maker VX Ace. It wasn’t great and had fewer fun features than XP in a lot of ways, but there was an active community of people making scripts for it and the few places where I thought it was better were significantly better. I published a short demo for an indie game contest built in it. You can still download the game by the way if you are interested. It is still bad, but something I spent 3ish weeks really trying to build into something decent.

After that I got RPG Maker MV and quickly ported my demo over to it as it was a much better game engine, worked on it for a while and eventually decided I want to do something else.

Once RPG Maker MZ came out though, I got very interested in RPG Maker again. I pre-ordered the game engine, something you should never do and went all out with it for a few months. Eventually life got busy and I couldn’t dedicate as much time to working on project I’d never show anyone. Every few months I get the itch to start working on my on and off again project though (a sandbox RPG with a focus on the magic system/magic themed game play). That is where I am at now.

It is Fun

I’ve used RPG Maker since I was in middle school and have continued to make small, but unpublished things with it over the years. Usually these never amounting to much more than a short demo of a single mechanic, but that is okay. RPG Maker is fun and that is the important thing.

What makes RPG Maker (specifically MZ) fun? It is easy to slap something together, but has the power to support complex games. You get a large set of assets, a decent reference manual, some plugins to use as examples for making your own, and an active community willing to help when you have questions right out of the box.

There are better game engines out there if you are making a serious game. Godot is open source, has both native 2D and 3D support, and is actively developed, a perfect indie power house. If you are doing AAA you either use an in-house engine or Unreal/Unity so you don’t have a choice in the mater. Godot is alright for rapid prototyping and making ideas a reality, but you don’t get everything included like RPG Maker and you have to commit to using it. RPG Maker will have you up and running by the time you finish the tutorial and read the manual. When you are just doing something for fun, moving the friction to a little while after you already got some familiarity with the thing rather than front-loading it means you will stick with it longer.

I think the most special thing with RPG Maker is that building a game feels more like modifying something than starting from scratch, even when you are stripping out most of the defaults. You have a mostly fun editor (it does get in the way sometimes), a fully open JavaScript based engine with all the data saved in JSON, and a bunch of community plugins to throw in when you can’t do something on your own. You can hack on the thing very easily and have fun doing it. The limitations can be frustrating, but it is also fun to overcome them. RPG Maker makes you feel smart when you tinker with it without being too overwhelming (at least till you try to do things in 3D or create extremely complex mechanics).

If I’ve convinced you to give it a try, here are some resources:

Community, Resources, and Where to get Started

Most of my recommendations will be for MZ as that is the most recent good RPG Maker for PC. Do not use the RPG Maker Unite Unity Plugin. If you wanted to suffer using Unity, there are better ways to do it. Also I’m not going to give you a list of every plugin, artist, etc. I use, just some general good stuff. Let me know if you have any recommendations to add or if you create stuff for RPG Maker and would like to be added to the list of resources below. I’d love to share more people’s work and more active communities.

Where to get RPG Maker and what to get

If you are interested in getting RPG Maker MZ or the other engines in the series, look at RPG Maker Web for the English store. You can also buy most of them on Steam, but your standalone license will often work as a Steam Key as well so it is generally better to get the standalone version. All the RPG Makers I’ve used work well under WINE/Proton on Linux and MV has a Linux Native version. If you are interested in older RPG Makers you might want to take a look at EasyRPG instead as it is a reimplementation of RPG Maker 2000/2003 and is open source. Development for EasyRPG seems to be very slow, but it is worth looking at.

RPG Maker Communities

Most of the RPG Maker communities have long since disappeared or are mostly abandoned, but the official English web forum is very active. You can get help, find free resources, and generally talk about RPG Maker there, lots of the resources are free for personal projects as well.

You will find lots of commercial resources on itch.io if you want to buy plugins, art, or music for your game.

There is some interesting stuff in the Chaos Project forums, especially if you use RPG Maker XP. Chaos Project is mostly abandoned though, the owner and some people post occasionally.

You will also find that the old rmrk.net forum is still online, but in read-only mode. You will find lots of older RPG Maker scripts and resources here.

You can also find the archives for rpgmaker.net, but they are all on Archive.org. rmn was a great place to find RPG Maker games to play and some were open to study.

There are Discord servers and subreddits for RPG Maker, but neither are amazing. Discord is an information black hole and Reddit posts have a tendency to disappear very easily. You might find something useful in a pinch though and Discord is decent for active conversations and bouncing ideas around.

MZ Plugins

I recommend you check out VisuStella’s RPG Maker plugins if you want to push the engine further than what the defaults allow, but don’t want to get your hands too dirty with JavaScript (learning a little JS will do you well though). A lot of their plugins add features that should have been built in or that enhance/play off the engine’s existing capabilities, but they also implement battle systems used in popular turn based RPGs, crafting systems, and more. They do cost a pretty penny, but are great if you want a lot more toys to play with or are making a game you plan to sell. There are thousands of free and paid plugins online, but VisuStella is an easy recommend due to how easy it is to make complex mechanics viable in RPG Maker and how professionally most of their products are made. Also VisuStella was founded by core members of the English-speaking RPG Maker community so I have a strong positive bias towards them, even with the less than ideal things they have done (their code is obfuscated and their community is stuck in a discord server).

The RPG Maker forums has a lot of awesome plugins and scripts for all the PC RPG Makers since XP.

Art Assets

For art assets, Jason Perry/FinalBossBlues makes some awesome art assets and even made a lot of the free ones being used in EasyRPG. His Patreon has thousands of free and beautiful assets that match his styles and he takes requests. You will again find a lot of the other resources and freebies in the communities I linked above, but if you are making a small indie game and want a consistent art style you will get more than your money’s worth here.

You can also find art and music on the RPG Maker Web store and itch.io in general. On the RPG Maker Web forums you can find both free assets and hire artists, musicians, and programmers for your projects.

Learning RPG Maker

For general tutorials, I recommend you read the manual and if you are using RPG Maker MZ play through the tutorial once. The docs are good and the tutorial is passible. Once you have done that you should be safe to start tinkering and ask good questions when you want to make something more complex.

Cazwolf has some YouTube tutorials you can follow for some basic things. A lot of stuff about how to do things in vanilla RPG Maker MZ without plugins.

Rainy Tei Productions has some tutorials as well. Her stuff is a lot more artsy and very specific to a particular task you might want to achieve in RPG Maker.

SomeRanDev also did some RPG Maker MV tutorials that will work with RPG Maker MZ as well. His style is a little more random and silly, but he still gives some detailed information if you can follow it.

You can also reach out to me if you have questions about making a specific mechanic with RPG Maker’s limitations or with VisuStella’s plugins. It will motivate me to make some RPG Maker tutorials.

RPG Maker is Flawed, but Beautiful

RPG Maker MZ has some problems. It is proprietary (the engine itself is source available JavaScript, but the editor is completely closed source), it is made specifically for a Japanese audience with a focus on JRPG style games with the English-speaking community often being an afterthought, and it is no longer supported by the developers. It is also pricey for a toy; you are getting your money’s worth and few other engines come with so many resources and prebuilt components, but the price is still high. The community forums are managed by the English/international publisher rather than the community itself. There are a lot of small issues like this.

With all that said, it is fun to use and the community is alive with helpful people. If price is an issue there is also the older ones that often go on sell for next to nothing if you just want a toy to play around with or a challenge for a more serious project.

If you have any questions about RPG Maker I’m more than happy to try answering them. I’d love to make more RPG Maker tutorials in the future.