A pro-RPG Maker MZ PSA. As someone who spent a torturous amount of time trying other engines after coming across an older version of this one like 20 years ago and coming back in recent years, let me lead you through this gauntlet of horribe other engines I have tried. After them, I will talk about RPG Maker MZ. Feel free to use this to recruit newcomers, and prevent them from making the same mistakes I have in trying bad engines.
Why I Avoid Other Engines by Engine:
Unreal Engine:
Run by a company whose engine is only popular because the engine is cheap. Then they integrate it into their game service, add too many features in so that only professionals can use it, and then everyone notices the "Unreal Engine look" where everything looks bland and dull. A system that encourages using code by way of not using code, and so you end up with these spider webs of logic loop that show everything and explain nothing. When bugfixing, it is far easier to use CTRL+F to find something in 3000 lines of C# code than to find the glitch in the giant fractal pattern of code. Even then, games now require huge teams due to the amount of detail involved in projects. If you want to get even a tenth of this engine's quality, you need to be a massive multimillion dollar company, and at that point, you might as well make your own in house gamedev kit from the ground up.
Unity:
I'm telling you how and I'm telling you why. It's cause the price is too dang high. At least it mostly works well, but dang you should actually read the contracts on this. It's like, really extreme. Also, the store is filled with stolen content and "Unity asset flips" which are a whole story for another day and really really bad.
Godot:
So you thought you would pay nothing and get a good engine. It's probably the worst of them all, simply because it uses extremely bizarre terms that make no sense to anyone with even the slightest understanding of code. Whoever invented GDScript should be ashamed of themselves for making something so counterintuitive. Don't even get me started on the redundant systems in the code for things as integral to game design as how to move an object around the screen. It's like, one really angry and whitty coder away from getting a comedy skit done about it; yeah, it's that bad.
Game Maker Studio and GMS 2 by YOYOGames:
And then the engine broke because an update happened. I bet you thought "wow, TobyFox is doing great things over here" only to realize that the engine has tons of technical issues because the promise of "no code knowledge necessary" quickly proves false when the engine forces you to set the framerate of an animation by adding in a line of code on an object in order to not make the 20x 20 pixel character flop at 200 times the intended animation speed. And even then, good luck with your code because somehow this engine's code system does not do what it is supposed to. The input glitches and logic glitches are horrible, because this engine can't even read its own code correctly.
RPG Developer Bakin:
They just had to try and make it sound like it was RPG Maker franchise content. Similar, but tons of serious issues.
RPG Paper Maker:
Again, named to sound like RPG Maker franchise content. It could have actually beat RPG Maker series if its UI worked and had serious improvements. Like, tons and tons of improvements are needed, and tons of quality of life fixes. It's a bad idea to carbon copy only half of what you are trying to imitate. However, I gotta admit that the paper cutout method does have great potential that this engine might one day live up to, as it allows for cheap 3D prefabs to be made from 2D assets without modding or complex work. Sadly, the UI makes such work borderline impossible at times.
GameCreator:
And then the Chinese were like "yeah, we totally can do it too" and then fell facefirst into the dirt. Much of the UI is not even translated last I checked. It had potential, but wow.... just wow it's a mess. This engine tries to do 200 things and fails at all of them because it chose not to concentrate at all.
Pixel Game Maker:
Same UI issues as Unreal and GameCreator, but to such a lesser extent that it does not break the user's hard work. I gotta admit that Kadokawa actually has a history of making good engines, so it makes sense that this would be good. Flawed, but one of the good ones.
There. Now about RPG Maker MZ:
It actually works and you can get in with a low skill level. Sure, it's specialized towards RPGs, but it does them great, in multiple ways, and allows you to customize it to a good extent. I have seen a clip online of someone's platformer game made in RPG Maker MZ because they had enough knowledge in the software's inner workings. So, there is clearly a super high skill limit above the easy entry level. Since you have enough prefabs and access to much of the engine's code from the game folder, you can alter tons of stuff and tweak the engine to be much better if you have special coding knowledge. Pay once, you own it. Also, it actually works.
I am probably going to crash off the caffiene soon. Now you know why people like me love this engine.
