To the Future, and beyond!
Hello Folks!
As I said in my previous post, there's a BIG change incoming.
Please, take 1-2 minutes of your time to read this, because it's important.
I don't know if you noticed, but between the end of january and the start of february, I was hit by another Massive drop in subscriptions.
I can understand people leaving for whatever reason, like losing interest in the game, or being unhappy about something, even tho the most "popular" choice is the financial issue, which is Totally understandable, especially with all the shit that's going on right now, but not getting ANY new subscription to compensate, Ever, well, that's getting my morale and motivation under the bridge right now.
Even after releasing the new update I barely got a little increase, which disappeared by the end of the month.
So after crying in a corn...ehm..."after deciding on what to do next" I went and asked other fellow devs for some advice, and, well, almost all of them said that I should run away as far as I can from rpg maker vx ace, because it's freaking old, and either upgrade to rpg maker MV, or drop the engine altogether and move to Ren'Py.
Now, I have Zero experience in coding with Ren'Py, and starting from scratch at this point won't be ideal in my opinion, but, on the other hand, I already own a copy of rpg Maker MV...
So, what are the advantages of using MV instead of VX Ace?
- For starters, I can use wharever resolution I want!
With Vx Ace I was bound with a 4:3 aspect ratio, and I had to use an external script to make the window a tiny bit larger too, while with MV there is a built-in plugin to customize the size of the window to whatever I want.
- MULTIPLATFORM!
Yep, that's right! With MV I can finally import my games to other system, like ANDROID! Mac and Linux. And that's something impossible to do with Vx ace.
So, why didn't I move sooner to MV?
Because right now, as you know, I'm making every sprite to looks like it's respective character, and I also make sex sprites to use during events, and that's something I can't do with MV, since it had those Chibi sprites, with Ultra big heads; but thankfully I was given a couple of workaround to still use VX Ace sprites on the new version as well.
The other reason was the fear to not being able to find all the needed plugins, or not being able to customize them as I wanted, since they work in a different way from VX Ace scripts.
It obviously won't be an immediate transaction, since I need to rebuild All the maps, and learn how to use the new plugins, while Stll drawing images for version 0.7; but I've already started stockpiling useful plugins and tilesets to use and I've already built a couple of maps buring the past week, so I won't start from Zero ^.-
I hope you'll understand that this is something that I Really need to do in order to continue, hoping that it will get me to a better situation.
It's true that MV is a lot more comfortable to play in, though I think there's still a lot of stigma against RPG Maker in general. Coding in Ren'py is very simple but it's basically just for visual novels, you'd have to throw away all your maps and sprites.
One thing to keep in mind is that RPG Maker *MZ* is already out. From what I understand it mostly has better performance than RPG Maker MV, and you can get a similar performance improvement by manually upgrading the javascript engine used by MV if necessary. But just be aware that MV is technically already outdated too.
I agree with Ver Greeneyes there is the stigma against RPGmaker games ingeneral so people do not even give a game a second glance most of the time.
as for upgrading MZ is out and may be where you want to focus your power at though it seems to suffer from the same Memory leaks as MV did and some time still do in some games so beware of that. at the same time MZ is newer and have fewer scipts so far but it will come with time MV has a lot of scripts now because it has ben out for a while.
Oh and Ruby will be a problem as you can not import anything you have on ACE Vx so you need to take a lot of time of either way weather you use MV, MZ or Renpy. Best of luck with you delibirations Senryu-Sensei :) it is not an easy one.
MZ is kinda young (not even 1 year old), so its support, especially when it comes to plugins, can't even compare to MV; and from what I understand, is just MV with a couple addition, not really worth its price. Just saying, but I yet have to see an h-game made with MZ (O.o)