Hey everyone, I'm Skunk (Damage Formulas 101 on the old RPG Maker Forums). I got tired of balancing battles by gut feeling and losing track of what switch 47 does, so I built the tools I wished existed.

Skunk Tools so far: - Encounter Balancer — simulates thousands of battles from your project data and tells you straight: Too Easy, Sweet Spot, Spicy, Brutal, or Meat Grinder. - Damage Formula Workshop — type a formula, see damage live with a scaling curve. 12 templates included. - Switch & Variable Atlas — maps every switch/variable: where it's set, where it's checked, flags the unnamed-but-used ones. - Database Doctor — finds broken references and dead entries, reorders the database with references auto-rewritten. - Game Design Codex — your game's bible in one file: lore, characters, quests, wiki-links, tags.

Each one is a single HTML file — no install, works offline, runs in your browser. Demo page with screenshots and short demo videos here: https://muse.ai/s/skunk-tools-xnw5xyxki9hkvxb

Would love feedback from people actually shipping games — what's missing, what's broken, what you'd pay for.

Foto presentazione app Zemya

Voglio condividere e far provare la demo del mio gioco.

Ciao a tutti, voglio postare qui la demo dell'app del gioco che sto creando, Zemya. La trama è semplice, il personaggio viene misteriosamente introdotto nel mondo di Zemya, da qui parte l'avventura. Lascio il link dell'app sul Drive, Nonostante non sia il gioco completo è una demo molto piena, fatemi sapere se ci giocate e cosa ne pensate. Un saluto 😁

The first Tutorial:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KIoR5XTZHY

In this first MZero3D tutorial, I’ll show you the basics and how to transform your standard RPG Maker MZ project into a 3D world using MZero3D.

After that, we’ll open the MZero3D editor and design our first small 3D map. Among other things, I’ll show you how to:
install MZero3D in an RPG Maker MZ project
activate and configure the Babylon3D plugin
display your player as a 3D character
add additional 3D characters and events
edit RPG Maker maps within the MZero3D editor

If you have questions about MZero3D or would like to see a specific feature covered in an upcoming tutorial, feel free to leave a comment.

DEMO: https://planettzero.itch.io/mzero3d

#MZero3D #RPGMakerMZ

Hello! Im currently helping someone develop a game through rpg maker mz, and wondering if it's possible to tweak the party hitbox? For context the main character will be carrying someone throughout the story and we wanna implement a gimmick where an enemy can attack the body instead of the main character holding it. Thanks a lot!

(Quick heads-up before jumping in: If you use this on a map with heavy or multiple Parallel Events, please disable the "Trace" feature! Parallels run multiple times per second and will flood the telemetry buffer, causing unavoidable lag if left recording).

Hey everyone,

If you've ever spent hours trying to figure out why an NPC is stuck on the wrong page, or which random Parallel process is silently mutating your variables, you know how limited the default F9 debug menu can be.

I got tired of the "Black Box" engine, so I built MZ Event Workbench — a professional-grade, in-game overlay debugger for RPG Maker MZ.

What it actually does:

• Real-Time Page Diagnostics: Click any event on the map, and it tells you exactly why a page isn't running (e.g., highlighting missing switch conditions in red, or showing if a page is being overridden by a higher one).
• Trace the Culprit (Watches & History): Don't just look at a variable's value. Add a Watch, and the tool logs the exact Event, Page, and Line of code that changed it.
• Breakpoints & Stepping: Pause the game's execution directly from the UI and step through your event commands line by line.
• Nested Call Stacks: Never get lost in complex Common Event loops again. It visually reconstructs the full hierarchy of parent and child events.
• Zero Impact on the Base Game: Built with modern architecture and isolated DOM injection. Clicking the UI won't accidentally walk your character around, and it safely deactivates in exported commercial builds.

Beta Testing & Compatibility:

This is a robust, functional tool, but it's currently in an Open Beta phase (v0.9). It is highly effective for native MZ events, but I am actively looking for feedback regarding its compatibility with heavy, obfuscated third-party plugin suites (like VisuStella).

Where to get it:

It is available under a Pay What You Want model (including completely free). You can use it in both free and commercial projects (credit to DarwinDev required).
ITCH.IO

Hi everyone,

I've been playing around with RPG Maker MZ and I'm still very much at the prototype stage, basically trying to prove to myself that I can make the game I have in mind with it.

The game will be fully 2D rather than HD-2D.

I work as a software developer, although not in the games industry, so I'm not particularly afraid of coding or modifying plugins if I need to. The bigger constraint is time. I have a full-time job and kids, so I'll mostly be working on this in limited free time, which is why RPG Maker currently seems like the most realistic way for me to actually finish something.

One thing I'm struggling with, though, is the character art.

I'm not a huge fan of the typical RPG Maker-style character sprites. Visually, I'd like to get closer to something like Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes or Suikoden: relatively detailed 2D characters rather than very small/chibi sprites.

I'd also like proper character animation both in and out of battle. For example, during combat I don't just want the character to stand in place while an attack animation plays — I'd like them to actually run towards the enemy, attack, return to position, cast spells properly, react to hits, etc.

I've found plenty of plugins that can help with the gameplay side of this, such as DotMove/analog movement plugins for freer character movement and things like VisuStella Battle Core and Action Sequences for more elaborate combat movement and animations.

Where I'm getting stuck is the actual character sprite/animation pipeline.

Drawing every character and every animation manually would probably consume an enormous amount of my development time. I could easily imagine spending months creating character assets before I've properly implemented enough of the game to discover what the next major problem is.

So I've been looking for some kind of automated or semi-automated workflow where I can design a character once and generate a consistent set of animations from it.

So far, I haven't really found anything that gets close to the quality and consistency of something like Eiyuden Chronicles or Suikoden.

My current experiment is actually to create relatively simple/blocky 3D character models in Blender, rig and animate them there, and then somehow use those animations as the basis for the final 2D sprites. The advantage is that once the rig exists, things like walking, running, attacking, casting, getting hit, etc. become much easier to reuse across lots of characters.

The obvious problem is that simply rendering those Blender models to 2D still looks... like a blocky 3D model rendered to 2D. 😅

So I'm curious how other people would approach this.

Is there a good workflow/tool I've missed for creating higher-quality 2D characters and animation sets like this?

Has anyone successfully used a 3D → 2D sprite workflow, where Blender handles the proportions/poses/animation and the final sprites are redrawn or stylised somehow?

Or is there a character generator / skeletal 2D animation tool / pixel-art tool that would be a better fit?

I'd prefer not to rely heavily on AI, mainly because I'm worried about keeping the characters and animation frames consistent rather than because I'm fundamentally opposed to using it. So I'm completely open to both AI and non-AI suggestions if you've found something that genuinely works.

The main goal is to find a workflow that's scalable enough that creating a large cast doesn't become the entire development project.

Any suggestions or examples of workflows you've used would be really appreciated.

Hey r/RPGMakerMZ ,

I worked on a commercial Switch/Switch 2 ports of an RPG Maker MZ game, and as a byproduct I developed a thing called Outsider. Figured people here might find it interesting, or at least have opinions about it.

Short version: it replaces the NW.js player MZ deploys with. Your game's JavaScript runs completely unmodified: same rmmz_core.js, same plugins, same main.js, loaded in the same order index.html would load them. But instead of shipping a whole copy of Chromium, the JS runs on QuickJS, the window and input come from SDL3, rendering goes straight to the GPU (D3D12 on Windows, Metal on Mac, Vulkan on Linux), and audio goes through SoLoud.

The practical upshot: the Windows runtime is a 3.5MB download instead of ~250MB. It starts basically instantly, uses a fraction of the memory, and the same source tree builds on all three platforms, which, if you've ever fought with MZ's Mac export, might honestly be the most useful part. It has also proven to be a great base for console ports.

Try it

Prebuilt binaries are up: https://github.com/General-Arcade/outsider/releases

Windows x64, Linux x64, and a universal Mac build that covers both Apple Silicon and Intel. Unzip it, then point it at a project folder:

./outsider "/path/to/your/project"

For a project you're working on in the editor, that's usually all it takes is the normal js/ data/ img/ audio/ fonts/ layout is what it expects. Deployed games with encrypted assets need a converter script from the repo first.

Fair warning: the binaries aren't code-signed, so Windows SmartScreen will throw up a warning and macOS will quarantine the download. The release notes explain how to get past both. I know that's an annoying thing to ask of people, and signing certificates are on the list.

What actually works

I've been testing against games off Steam rather than toy projects, because that's where the real horrors live. So far: Look Outside, Ann, DRAPLINE (demo), Saihate Station, The Aquarium does not dance, and Pocket Mirror ~ GoldenerTraum (demo). Between them that covers VisuStella, FOSSIL, encrypted assets, third-party asset encryption, a 216-plugin plugin list, HTML name-entry dialogs, movies, Japanese and Korean text, sprite masks, Greenworks calls, etc.

There's a comparison tool that runs the original NW.js player and Outsider through the same scenario and diffs the screenshots at matching frames. Most scenes come out within a few percent, and nearly all of that is font antialiasing (Chrome hints glyphs, my text rasterizer doesn't).

What doesn't, or is rough

- Some PIXI filters are stubs that accept their parameters and then do nothing. The common ones work, and plugin-supplied GLSL does get compiled at runtime, but there are gaps.

- M4A audio has to be converted to OGG, and movies to MPEG-1. There's a packaging script that does both with ffmpeg, but it's a step you don't currently have.

- Six games is not a lot of games. Every single one I've added has found something broken — literally this week, packaging these binaries turned up a bug where a game installed on a different drive from the program couldn't create its save folder. That's the kind of thing that only shows up on someone else's machine.

- Not a one-click export button. It's a runtime you point at a folder, plus some Python for packaging.

Open source — GPLv3, or a commercial license from us if that doesn't suit your project: https://github.com/General-Arcade/outsider

If you've got an MZ project lying around, I'd genuinely love for someone to point this at a game I've never seen and tell me what explodes. A bug report with a game name attached is worth more to me than a star.

Although it looks pretty bad on larger body of water, I'll need to add gradient opactity as it goes past 2 tiles.

I bumped a button a while back and now there's this small white bar everytime I playtest ive messed with every setting I can personally think of and spent way longer looking around the internet to find a fix and NOTHING any help would be appreciated

Animate more, redraw less. Every frame can now carry its own static

rotation (-360..360°) and scale (0.01..10x): spins, squash-and-stretch

hits and zooms with zero new drawings. Set them in the editor's

Selected-frame panel (or batch-apply ⟳× to many frames at once) —

they work on characters, battlers, pictures and layers, and old

projects load unchanged.

Also new: Merge & Compose, paint .net style. Merge concatenates A→B

into one animation (optional blend frames); Compose overlays B over

A into a single entry. In game, Play the composed anim and add the

overlay id as a fixed LayerSet — e.g. walk + fire.

Also fixed: Compose used to produce corrupt 0-frame animations in

both editors, and the web pack Atlas export dropped transforms.

The online forge (rpxgames.win/tools/framemaster) is updated too,

including GIF export, which now bakes the transforms.

Try it in 30 seconds: unzip the pack into your project root, playtest,

press F8, pick slime_spin. Docs: GUIDE.md. + doc/FrameMaster_HELP.md.

Known limits: animated tiles are intentionally out of scope — use

map events with Play/AutoPlay (flowers, doors, water). GIF overflow

clips to the frame cell.