> It's similar to some other languages, like Lua, and is very easy to pick up if you have knowledge of basic programming concepts.
Why not just use Lua or one of the forks like Luau?
RPG in a Box: A grid-based, voxel-style game engine built on Godot - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37502218 - Sept 2023 (21 comments)
But then I had a look at the community showcase [1], and it's really impressive what people are doing. I've played a lot of Minecraft, and have experienced genuine awe and terror in those environments. And some of the community showcase screenshots definitely give me that same immersive feeling that I get in Minecraft, and which pixel art games don't really offer.
I just had a look in the forums and it looks like you can do pixel art games in this engine, too. [2]
So I guess my advice is to maybe highlight more of the community creations on the homepage as well as first-person worlds.
Anyway, any tool that encourages and enables creativity is awesome. This is very cool!
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/rpginabox/comments/1hqx3h4/im_so_gr...
That may be a part of why they chose to take a 3d approach instead. RPG Maker has 20 years of iteration, so it's pretty hard to compete in that space. It's already a bit difficult as is to stand out in a 2D space to begin with.
Meanwhile, 3D is still a hard problem and Voxels give that flexibility to make assets by hand that fit into an overall game.
My platform has moderate success (multiple games released each day), but to compete with RPG Maker means being 10x better. I was hoping to grab some of that market, but marketing wise it's incredibly difficult.
After its creator raised €100,000 to release it under the GPL, Blender became the leading open-source 3D tool it is today.
And they make enough money from recurring donations, service subscriptions, merchandise, conferences and trainings.
There are/were plenty of open source RPG makers, but they never gained any real traction.
I considered open sourcing my product in the past (did so with a previous game), so maybe one day. I still have some big things planned :).
* Step 2: Open source project
* Step 3: Find other streams of revenue (donations, grants, subscriptions, sponsorships)
Plus not everyone wants to give their product away. I see that advice all the time here and reddit and other places, "just opensource it" as if that's a solution to every problem a creator might have. I even saw it on a gamedev subreddit where a guy was asking how to make more money and people were saying to make it opensource, as if making it free would somehow increase sales for him.
I'm not sure if we had that perfect storm in game engines yet. Unity fumbled big time, but Godot wasn't quite mature enough to fully take advantage of that opportunity.
What did Nintendo do to you people? I've grown up playing very pixelated games on the ZX Spectrum but I have zero nostalgia for those graphics.
I’m currently playing Octopath Traveler 2 and it completely recreates this feeling, the art is beautiful and very pixelated.
This is not the only way to do low budget graphics. Too bad very few creators realize it.
(I noticed this because the page was loading unreasonably slowly for unclear reasons. In cases like this, a GIF <img> has a worse failure mode than <video>.)
Every child has seen a face in a cloud and 'designed' something outside of themselves. This is where teachers are amazing. Teachers know how to nurture that against the pressure of society crushing it.
It was python+pygame that got one of my kids to learn to program and minecraft modding that got another to learn. Neither code now but that wasn't the point.
Hm. My teachers rather stopped me from looking outside the window to see faces in the clouds and placed me on a seat far away from any window so I could fully focus on the less interesting topics at hand, that society demands that I know. (Yet when I was succesfully done with all that schools, I found that I learned very little of practical value from my higher education anyway)
When I was 12, I originally wanted to make video games, but found that I just loved building things and felt like programming was a magical toolbox. For me, it's not a means to an end, but the journey I actually like - I'm a builder, not a storyteller.
As a user I wont dedicate myself to a software, the community can't fork. Like the enshitiffication risk is far to high.
gcc is free and open source software. Should everything compiled with gcc be free?
apache is free and open source software. Should every website be noncommercial?
Yes.
>gcc is free and open source software. Should everything compiled with gcc be free?
Yes.
>apache is free and open source software. Should every website be noncommercial?
Yes.
* this is a movie reference please don't come for me
TFA is not that.
A note to the author -- if you ever considered going open source, you could use the same strategy used by Ton Roosendaal to open source Blender:
In July 2002, Ton launched a campaign called "Free Blender" to raise money (100,000 EUR) directly from the community. To everyone's surprise and delight the campaign reached the goal in only seven short weeks.
In October 2002, Blender was released under the GNU GPL. Roosendaal created the Blender Foundation to manage development, and the project kept growing from there. Today, Blender is one of the most popular 3D creation tools, used by professionals, hobbyists, and even studios.
Being free and open source allowed Blender to power countless creative projects, including the 2025 Oscar-winning film Flow.
This would've been much harder if the tool had stayed behind a paywall.
But on the other hand, $100k seems like quite a small one-time payout for a huge amount (obviously years) of effort, unless someone has exhausted all other plans to continue trying to compete with established software by commercializing their project.
For a lucrative game, a reasonable value would be 2 to 4 years of earnings.
For example: if the product makes $10K/month:
$10k × 36 (a mid-range multiple) = $360,000
Seems like he should have set a higher goal.
When I see apps like this, I get the fear that it has those RPG maker vibes where all the games will be same-y. That Roblox / minecraft kind of lack of uniqueness that makes for a great mod-game, but it always harkens back to the same patterns you use in the game engine that start to bother gamers like me.
I'm working on a pixel RPG in gamemaker right now, using Claude as help, and I've developed a reasonably complex classic pixel RPG in less than a few weeks. I still had to constantly correct claude, but it was more often 10 steps forward and one step back. My whole engine and experience is mostly done, and now it's the fun part of designing the world.
I almost have an entire sheet of custom sprites I plan on offering as well.
I wouldn't trade my experience for some out of the box thing where I don't own a lot of the game's core content.
Languages require a huge amount of support, and you're going to be way too busy building an RPG maker to properly support a whole language. That means you're just going to wind up with a shitty unsupported custom language no one wants or knows how to use.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Lua_(programming_lang...
It's something that everyone should do at least once, ideally on a hobby project where it wouldn't be that hard to rip it back out if needed.
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