The story of your first project!

[ShaflaHopeLove]

Title c: Or do you not remember? Try to remember! We all had our first projects in any Maker (and 99.99999999% of the makers abandoned it).

I started with XP, and for information I only had a video tutorial of the basics of events, what followed was not pretty:

• Super flat characters. To the point of saying basically "hello" and "goodbye" in their dialogues.
• History for nothing original and extremely basic.
• Walking Simulator There were no fights, just walking, talking to a small group of NPCs, and repeating.
• Events I didn't know the switches and the command to move events, it ends badly.

In the end I canceled it, but after months due to the wonderful power of procasting.

I thought I was the only procastiner, horrible designer, and worse writer, when I started with my first project about 3 or 2 years ago, but as I entered the community of the sacred makers I realized that I was not the only one (in those moments I was without internet, and that is to live in a cave).

And you? Tell how your first project was!

 

[Liandra Aura]

“The Castle” was a short story I worked on in 5th grade and tried to adapt to RPGMaker 2000. My dad had a problem with me owning rm2k though because it was unverified jacked software from Don Miguel. Never got to finish it.

 

[bgillisp]

First project ever? I used a DOS game maker back in 1991/1992 and made a game where all i did was try to 1-up every RPG I had ever played to this point. Now, at that point the only RPG's I'd played were Might and Magic I and Wizard's Lair (a shareware game), so I had little to draw from.

I actually finished it in a week, and...it was awful. I actually gave a copy of it to a kid in my class and he said he liked it...somehow.

 

[TheNewSon]

I think my first "serious" project was a Fatal Frame fangame using RMXP, many years ago (a decade or so). Until then I was only playing with the engine, without a specific project in mind. Despite using mostly RMXP's RTP for characters and tilesets, I had ripped stuff from the first PS2 game to use in the project as items and battle components. However, my greatest source of pride at that time was my writing, haha! I had written a lot of stuff, but I ended up deleting everything during a particularly depressing stage of my life. That project was never mentioned in any forums.

 

[Soryuju]

This isn’t really a conventional first project story, but I first started with RPG Maker just under a year and a half ago, and I’ve been gradually iterating on my first project ever since then. What’s unusual about my time working on this project is that I’m a volunteer doing health work in a rural Tanzanian village, and game dev is the hobby I’ve been pursuing alongside that work.

I’m fortunate enough to have electricity in my house, but no running water, and the internet is barely good enough to access this website from my phone (which is how I write virtually all of my posts here). About once a week, I take a bus into town for groceries and somewhat better internet access, and I’ve used those trips to try to download resources, tutorials, etc on my data (WiFi is almost nonexistent out here). I still only have an average download speed of 50 kB/s in town, though, and the connection drops regularly, so there are major limits on what materials I’ve had access to as I’ve been trying to cobble my first project together.

On the other hand, village life is slow-paced, and there aren’t nearly as many distractions around compared to when I was back at home. I’ve had lots of time to study game design, to think in detail about my project’s systems, and to find ways to cope with the limitations of my situation. I’ve scrapped more concepts than I can remember, usually before they even left the paper stage. It’s easy to spend too much time in my own head, but I like to think that my project will eventually be better for it.

A couple months ago, I had a chance to visit home, and I used that time to download all the video and PDF tutorials on JavaScript and graphic design that I could find. Since then, I’ve been trying to use some of my time out here to slowly get a handle on those.

But it’s all been getting easier. I’m getting faster at designing systems. My ideas are getting sharper and more elegant. I’m not quite as intimidated by JS and GIMP as I used to be. Overall, I’m starting to turn the limitations I’ve faced into strengths, and my first project is very slowly beginning to take shape. There’s still a long road ahead before I’ll have something which I’m satisfied with releasing, and I may still look back after it’s done and cringe at the results, like many do. But the story behind this first project will always be unique, and I don’t want that story to end with “I gave up.” So even if it’s slow and difficult, I’m going to make the best of what I’ve got here and see it all through to the end.

 

[ShaflaHopeLove]

@Soryuju

Wow! Extremely inspiring the beautiful lines you have written, I can't stop wishing you luck in your project. I feel that your story could eliminate the procastination to anyone.

I am in a situation similar to yours in terms of resources and internet, I understand you.

I love you!

 

[Redeye]

My RPG making experience actually began with RM3 for the PS2. I never finished any of the projects I started with it, except for the very first, which was a total mess littered with sample data. All I remember about it is that the main character was named Ed and you fought a Balrog multiple times. That was back when I was, like, 11 or something. I tried to make several other games after I joined the RM Pavilion, with my first ever post on that site being the entire wall-of-text plot of my next game idea "Dornia's Lament". Then you've got "Rise of Apocalypse" in which I boasted for it having a 20+ minute intro with a bunch of unused and irrelevant lore crammed into it. Then there was "Imprisoned", but it never even got past the planning stage.

Then I switched to VX and began the first and only project that I have ever completed thus far. I remember back in the old days of this site where you could order an infinite amount of free trials for VX, and I abused that glitch to get somewhere around 3 months of free trials. With that short time, I started a game called "Seige" (yes, I spelled it that way. I spelled it so badly that @Wavelength hasn't been able to spell it correctly himself for years). The game wasn't about a Siege at all, and I even tried to explain it like "It's not a physical siege, it's a siege on the emotions of the main characters I'm so deep y'all".

The story was a jumbled mess with weird elements of FF13's story (it even had ripped FF13 music). It started with a mercenary whose faction was at war with some unnamed country and had a rivalry with some white-haired Sephiroth wannabe. His camp gets blown up, he wanders through the forest, finds a singing girl and recruits her. She takes him to her hometown, which is a barren, empty town whose only other resident is a robotic shopkeeper. The girl tells the mercenary that they should find her brother, some blacksmith who lives alone in the mountains. They go to the mountains, recruit him, and then they get blown up by an enemy airship. Shenanigans ensue, they go to a slum and recruit a thief, they go down to the sewer for some reason and fight a villain called the Sentinel, some evil robot guy with no backstory or anything. (For some reason, I had the bright idea to add in over a million random villains for the sake of it)

Shenanigans ensue, they fight some random demon guy, they go to a swamp to recruit a witch, but it turns out she's dead (I didn't know how to add more than 4 party members, so I killed the 5th party member offscreen and scrapped the 6th entirely). You then go to a desert for some reason and fight the Sentinel again, killing it, and then you fight Sephiroth wannabe and kill him too. The mercenary dude gets sad for some reason, because I just had to include a "party in-fighting" moment (which only resulted in mercenary dude yelling at singing girl for some reason). The party then storms the capital city of Hvndjsvsr, which is completely war-torn. They head up to the palace to find the prince, who turns out to be cursed or something. You fight him twice in a row, with no difference between the two forms, and in his dying moments he tips you off about a bad guy who wants to destroy the world for no reason.

You go to the bad buy's lair (which is a volcano because of course it is) and kill him, but not before he casts the spell that destroys the world. Yup. The bad guy wins. The party then wakes up on a completely different planet and is told that the only way to restore their world and save everyone is to slay a god and his 3 demon children. The party proceeds to infiltrate some old man's robot factory, steal his airship, fly to a temple where you fight a demigod that can transport you to the ethereal realm, and then fight the 3 demon children. Then you confront God, random shenanigans ensue and the mercenary randomly obtains an uber-powerful magic sword, and kills God, restoring the old world. The end.

I don't know how I remember all of this.

I also remember that the game had no skills. You just used basic attack on everything. Also, like FF13, the game was so linear that you couldnt even return to previous maps.

The funniest thing is that, when I tried to release it, it was undecryptable because of the ripped music. The entire release was a total dumpster fire. I still have yet to release a full game. XD

 

[bgillisp]

@TheNewSon :

I removed your link, as we do not allow ripped resources in any way shape or form on this forum. This is due to copywrite law.

 

[Ninjakillzu]

Do you want to play my first project? I still have it, and it's truly horrible. I was making it with RPG Maker VX around 2007, and it was never finished.

It's called Project 4 because I never actually gave it a name. The mapping is atrocious, no sense of balance, full of references (for instance, Doom and Wolfenstein), and terrible dialogue. Screenshots of the dialogue: .

My second project is a remade version of Project 4. It's called Element War~Runegem because I wanted something that sounded vaguely JRPG-like and I hadn't played a single JRPG. This one is actually complete and I still have this as well. One of my current projects is a new incarnation of this one, but with a much larger scope and backed up by all my experiences with RPG Maker.

I was working on 4 different projects with VX, and only the one was completed.

 

[Soryuju]

@ShaflaHopeLove Glad you found some motivation from my story! I’ll be rooting for you as well!

 

[Paladin-Cleric of Awesome]

My first ever game was called Royal Knights, made with XP. The story of Kieron Whitethistle and her journey from Greywood Village to Castletown to become a Royal Knight.

technically if that was all there was to the game I did actually finish. It was awful. But I finished. The mapping was pretty cool though.

but this one story has stayed with me always and a lot of my later games, Corruption, WItches Heart, etc take place in the same game world and I’m constantly building lore and characters.

I will have to go back and remake Royal Knights.

 

[Aesica]

First project in anything? Mine was an atrocious bullet hell shooter I wrote using flash. Basically, the protagonist was part of a doomsday cult that paralleled popular religion, but she turned on them because the plot says she does. The cult leader wanted to remake humanity in her own image, so she used a giant bomb...and succeed. There was going to be a part 2, but Flash was dying and the game sucked too much for me to care, so I didn't bother. Features:

• A somewhat-evil Mary Sue protagonist
  
• A useless hop-along character that was really just there for the protagonist to talk to between each stage
  
• A boring "I want to destroy the world and remake humanity in my image, ha ha!" antagonist
• Lazy dialog in general
• Memes and tentacle jokes
  
• Graphics that helped me realize I'm not an artist
• At least the music was good (because it's the part I didn't make!)

Part of me actually wants to remake this game in a less terrible way, this time as an RPG. Maybe. Dunno if I'll bother though.

 

[Prescott]

The very first one that I actually took seriously instead of just dinking around with the program was called The Weak Spartan. I was like, 12 years old or something and it was in XP. It was about a kid who was born in Sparta but had some defect so he wasn't strong enough, and he was left to die out in the wilderness. Another family picks him up and he learns the truth about who he is and for SOME REASON he goes and battles some evil magic warlord. I finished that game but I wouldn't consider it to be at all polished.

The first game I made that WAS polished, at least a little bit, was a game called Grandma's House for a Halloween game jam. The pathfinding for the enemies made the game lag a lot but other than that I thought it was pretty solid. I only made the game in 30 days so it was a fun challenge and taught me a lot on how to finish a project. That one was about a girl whose grandma passes away and gives her the deed to her house as inheritance. She travels there and gets stuck inside the house and there are monsters and such that she has to defeat while she's trying to get the power back on. It had a fear system where if you weren't standing in light your fear meter would go down, which was pretty cool.

 

[LycanDiva]

My very first RPG Maker project is an unfinished game called Wild Saga that I started in the PS1 version of the engine. I was enjoying the story I created, but I felt held back the the interface of the PS1 version...especially text input, since I had to use that terrible letter box thing that made editing spelling errors and updating any text at all a real hassle. Now, it's just sitting on a memory card in a little box covered in black faux fur, languishing in an unfinished state. I may revisit it later and remake (and finish) it in MV...one day...

 

[M.I.A.]

The basic story was that "geomancy" was becoming considered too powerful by the other magic users and they were aiming to eliminate all geomancers. Spoiler Alert: your two main party members were the last two geomancers.

-MIA

 

[cthulhusquid]

The first one I did was called "Magical Castle~Battle Knight". The title hardly has any relation to the actual game, it was supposed to be "JRPG-like" from the viewpoint of someone who never played a JRPG. Anyway, you start off as Ralph in an unnamed town. You talk with your friend Joseph, and do a bunch of complaining about how you want adventure. He brings up a rumor about some magic crystals that are "powerful and kingdom ruling", and are supposedly on another continent where a famous battle known as the "Tri-Battle" was fought. You need to get permission to leave the village, so as you are wandering around you find an elf about to be sacrificed in one of the village houses. You free her from the clutches of her captor, and find some magic crystal pieces in a crack in the wall. You then go to clan leader, Master Chung, and ask him to let you leave and search for the "Six Crystals of Power"*. After training with some of the village guard, he mentions you will be fighting the forces of Dragoth, who is some evil guy that wants to destroy the kingdom.*

He sends you to some place called the Wood Kingdom, with the main castle. On your way there, you can stop by a village full of random crap*. Inside, you talk with the king and the elf conveniently speaks up, mentioning the fact that she is an elf and that's important. The king tells you to go to the Snow Kingdom in the south* and the plot ends there as it was never finished. There is other stuff shoved in this tiny castle, like a guy who lets you hire more party members, a skeleton called Diablo, and a blond haired guy called "The WoW-God".* Both of them give you very difficult quests, sell overpowered and absurdly expensive gear, overuse the word "epic", and make all sorts of bad pop-culture references. The game basically separates from the established "lore" at this point, as this screenshot proves below.

On top of all this absurdity, there is a tower on the world map that if you go in, you can't leave. Diablo traps you in Hell, which looks a lot like an Inn but filled with skeletons and lava. Ralph's ordeal and the tower are directly referenced in another one of the games I am working on, which took the good ideas from Magical Castle~Battle Knight and made them into something much better and cohesive. No matter how bad a project is, you can still find pieces that can get used.

* You didn't know the name of the crystals before, but now you do for sake of exposition.
* The kingdom of what, you don't know.
* There's a kid who's scared of a spider, a dragon statue comes to life and fights you twice in a row, and monster who is discriminated against and just wants to live in his house in peace.
* You heard that right. Geography is no concern to magic kingdoms.
* Also referred to in-game as the "World of Warcraft Deity of energy drinks and caffeine".