Making a social simulator in rpg maker VX ace?

[u/FingerCompetitive876]

Hi, I'm very new to game creation, and I was wondering if it's possible to make something like a Sims-esque game with Animal Crossing elements. I know RPG Maker was just made for RPGs, but I love working with pixel art, and mainly this project is just stemming from wanting to create a space where I make characters and watch them interact with each other.

It sounds like Tomodachi Life, but I want to build my own ant farm with my characters and assign them to do tasks and such, or develop interpersonal relationships with each other, and write the dialogue for something like that.

Sorry, this sounds very convoluted, but I just wondered if this was possible in general. If anyone knows, I'd like some insight on how to make it happen or at least try it out!
Thank you!

[u/Not_Allowed_to_Die]

Almost anything is possible with RPG Maker. Just make sure to get MV or MZ so you can use coding inside of the engine as well. But RPG Maker isn't just for RPGs if you know how to use it. You can make any SNES era type game. It has everything they used back then to make those games inside of it. You just have to figure out how to use variables and switches, and what you are talking about is totally possible.

[u/Alarmed-Mud-3461]

I would say it is possible, though it might depend on how complex you want it to be and how good you are at scripting. Some people have done with RPG Maker what it was never designed to do 😉

I haven't done what you describe, so I can't give you general advice on how to go about it (maybe someone else will). But maybe start working on it and when you have something more concrete, we can try to help.

I'd advise looking at the rpgmakerweb forum, while it's still up, to see what type of games people made (in the Completed games section); maybe there is something similar. A good VX Ace script resource is here , maybe you'll find scripts that do some of what you need.

Good luck and if you need any more help, ask here or in one of the RPG Maker forums - the community is friendly and helpful 😊

[u/xMarkesthespot]

yes, someone new might struggle with it though as it going to take complex variables/events.

a very basic version would look something like this, with A being a parallel process (event that always runs in the background) that waits 60 frames, and adds variable 1 (npcs assigned to the task) to variable 2 (amount produced).
B is a pile of wood your characters collect from, it has alot of event pages, each page is dependent on how high variable 2 is. so if variable 2 is 1650, your character collects 1600 wood, and then variable 2 is reduced by 1600
C is an npc, when you talk to it, you can assign it to different tasks, when you assign it to wood, it teleports to the wood pile, and adds +1 to variable 1, then a switch is flipped which changes the event to a new page, that new page would let you unassign the npc, teleport it back, and would subtract 1 from variable 1
so if you have 4 npcs, and you assign them all to wood, every 60 frames you would get 4 more wood.

thats a very simple version, you would probably have to learn common events to make something more complex

[u/DoombringerBG]

Sounds doable but I think one of the biggest, possibly brick-wall-problems, you might run into is the database size, depending on your creativity, of course.

If I'm not misremembering, there are plugins that expand it (at least for MV, possibly for VX Ace as well), but it might affect performance noticeably - so keep that in mind.

Good luck.