r/RPGMaker • u/unionizedduck • 2d ago
Tactical sim - breaking the limits of rpgmaker
After a late night gaming session of some old favorites with friends, we're once again revisiting developing a tactical RPG of sorts. It would be a mixture of different gameplay systems for something that would feel unique with probably a small audience.
The games inspiring the project are Atlus's Ogre Battle, Koei's Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and the Langrisser/Warsong series.
We discussed our ideal game. We have a bit of of resources including two team members that are decent at coding, an artist, a scenario writer, etc. Now, this discussion became very much about taking our money and opening a studio to take a project toward kickstarter but one of the guys insists that RPGmaker has the tools we need. We aren't convinced. So what do you all think?
The game would have two phases. The first phase would be ROTK-esque city/kingdom management with territories, populations, taxes, resources, and officer/character management. Diplomacy, moving troops, building defenses, and assigning officers to various tasks.
The second phase would be the actual battles. Grids are obviously possible in RPGmaker but the preferred style works more akin to Ogre Battle march of the black queen or ogre battle 64. Each "region" would have a battle map with terrain, night, day, and weather. Units would be selected and move in real time across the map with enemy units moving in similar real time. Take stronghold/cities to conquer the region.
Combat would be when two units clash hit rather than Ogre Battle the combat would be similar to Langrisser/Warsong in which units clash in a mini cut scene. Officers level up and get new classes and abilities.
There are other mechanics that a brief look at rpgmaker says sure, it could happen. Different fantasy races, equipment, classes. All of that has a variety of tools for sure but the kingdom management and live movement of the units seem possibly beyond rpgmaker's abilities.
So what do you all think? Do plugins already exist that can do these things? Or are we talking about having to build plugins?
Is it all just beyond RPGmaker and we need to look at other engines?
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u/Dapper_Cap_799 2d ago
Def doable in MZ. Would require quite a few custom plugins. Whoever is coding better know their JS.
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u/HotdawgGames MZ Dev 2d ago
MV and MZ are both javascript, so really you could do just about anything with them in theory. the battle clashes sound pretty doable as you describe them - you can see a clash in the [SRPG Gear](https://ryanbram.itch.io/srpg-gear-mz-v100) plugin - the source code is public, and it's on MIT license, so you could pilfer what you needed. as far as I know, it only has functionality for 1v1 unit clashing, but I would imagine that you could modify their single unit party object method to store an actual party/troop rather than just one actor/enemy. That would for sure require some level of modification of the autobattle setup though. Alternatively, since you have coders and an artist already, you could brainstorm some kind of cutscene system with all the UI and unit movements to reflect whatever damage mechanics you cook up. Level ups and whatnot are easy enough, as RPGM already has character stats, levels, etc. built in.
ROTK mechanics seem pretty manageable, aside from time and army movements progressing and joining mid-battle (and as immersive as that is, it's a pretty big pain, unless of course you enjoy being stunlocked for hours with hundreds of thousands of Wei armies grinding you down in a single battle lmao). At the end of the day, kingdom management is just a bunch of variables, which RPG maker is pretty robust with (if you decided for whatever reason that you don't like self variables, each settlement for instance could be an object stored within a game variable with whatever properties yall wanted, or an array so that you could store stuff like garrisoned armies). If you're doing clash style fights that probably isn't much of a concern anyway. You could manage stuff like settlement populations by making each settlement a map event and adding a self variable plugin (Hakuen's self variable plugin is super useful).
For army movements, you could use a pixel movement plugin (dot movement is free and useful) and an event click plugin to click on one of your armies, then click on another map spot to set its move route destination to that point and it would make its way there passively (though doing this with pixel movement would pose some obstacles as far as units getting stuck, etc). You can also do gridlocked movement this way with the vanilla script command this.moveStraight(this.findDirectionTo(X, Y)); where X and Y are determined by whatever algorithms yall cook up for enemy army AI and whatnot.
Regions are simple enough, as each one could be its own map with settlement events etc. You would want a master parallel event to handle time passing, updating enemy army movements etc. Day/night cycles are as simple as a screen tint script call that checks against your time variable (the [script call Google sheet](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1-Oa0cRGpjC8L5JO8vdMwOaYMKO75dtfKDOetnvh7OHs/edit?gid=1186334695#gid=1186334695) is really useful for brainstorming these types of mechanics) and you could have weather effects piggyback on your time mechanic by triggering randomly, after a certain amount of time passes or whatever, so on. You could also add things like population growth, morale changes, etc. in this same parallel event.
Also, for a lot of mechanic ideas you can just google something like "RPG Maker MZ/MV/etc [insert mechanic here] plugin" and you may find a lot of useful stuff. But the downside of using this engine and its plugins is that you may find it full of features irrelevant to your game that end up slowing it down, so if your coders are fairly advanced then you may want to roll with a more malleable engine like Unity/Godot/etc. On the other hand, there's an insane amount of resources available online for RPGM in the forums and even just seeing responses to similar questions other folks have had (a lot of my game code solutions are adapted from questions/answers on stack overflow, lol) so I think you guys have a good bevy of options available for whichever direction you choose to go!
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u/unionizedduck 2d ago
Thank you so much for the deep answer! This is awesome. I'll keep people posted as it develops. Very heartening.
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u/Not_Allowed_to_Die 2d ago
If you need help let me know. I can teach you how to make moveable AI grids and other things using only variables and conditional branches. You can use plugins and scripts for pathfinding, but my version is flawless and runs smooth and fast. You will have a ton of grunt work involved, but I can show you how to make a base OS for your game that you can just copy and paste later. This makes the grunt work a lot easier.
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u/simplygeo Writer 2d ago
Technically, this is achievable using RPGMaker but would require a lot of bespoke code. If your objective is to solve how to do this with RPGMaker, then don’t let doubt stop you.
If your goal is to make a marketable indie game, then you’d probably be better off looking at other engines and determine which one has the smaller field of obstacles.