RPG Maker MZ Touch the Stars Game Jam

My biggest one was the MZ crashing every time I wanted to change an icon lol

But in all seriousness I'd love to know what people had the most trouble with. For me it was polishing the game. I know it's still very far from that ideal product that I had in my head. Overall I'm very satisfied with the end result but only can feel like there's still so much more to do but my lack in technical skill couldn't let me achieve it. I'm happy I got what I did so far without big plugins, the only one I used is a small one to skip the FIGH/ESCAPE menu in fights.

If you want you can check out my game here. Thanks if you do!

Cupid HyciSubmitted3 years ago(+1)

Battle balancing I guess. I'm still not sure if I'm satisfied with everything in that department.

I'll try out your game and give feedback on your balancing. For RPG maker games I only focus on bosses, so no mob enemies at all cause a lot of them have grinding mobs and it can slow down play testing. But that's just my preference.

AI SinSubmitted3 years ago (2 edits) (+1)

I had a lot of trouble with trying to not use any plugins. I wanted to try to avoid using plugins for this jam, since that is basically what I've always done with these jams.

Unfortunately, the game is very limited in what it can do without plugins, but I think I did pretty well with pushing the engine to do stuff it wasn't really meant to.

It definitely sounds like the free version was very buggy. I was using the steam version, so I didn't have the same issues, though I think they updated the engine in the middle (July 4th) and I, like a crazy person, despite the update having no benefits for my project (seeing as how I wasn't using plugins), updated the core script... and broke half my game.

I didn't want to use plugins since learning them can take a lot of time and instability can be common place. I wish changing the visual look of menus or HUDs could be done in program with more control. I'll check your game out and give whatever useful feedback I can!

Yea the free version is very unstable at times. I have MZ on my other computer but an older version and I didn't know(or rather not risk) if it would create bugs in my other project. So I got the free version on my laptop and made the Jam game with that. So they have some kinks to smooth out on the newest version.

One thing to note is to not update the core script unless you have to. That is what really causes the bugs. Aside from that, you could potentially make your entire game in notepad++ ~~like I do.~~

GenRexSubmitted3 years ago (1 edit) (+1)

As an individual creating games with RPGMAKER, it's definitely hard to source your own work that's for sure. Art, story, character busts, music, mapping and so much more is a lot to take in as a sole person especially in just the span of a month. But it's a sign of hard work and effort that I appreciate from anyone when participating in these Jams.

Starline ArtsSubmitted3 years ago(+2)

Yup I agree! I believe that even if you aren't good at drawing/making music/etc you should try to make custom assets, especially to stand out for the rest. I think most can recognize the effort at the least. I personally love drawing and making music(all the art and music in mine was made by me).

I'll be sure to give your game a look!

LotreinSubmitted3 years ago(+1)

The most difficult thing is not to stretch the game for more than an hour. But it seems that I have gone a little beyond one hour. If, of course, you read all the dialogues and interact with the environment. It is difficult to make the game short when the game is very full of plot.

Starline ArtsSubmitted3 years ago(+2)

It is difficult to provide the plot in such a span if you have a lot of it. It's easier to make the plot more character centric imo it'll feel more natural and the player would be far more invested.

I'll try out your game for sure!

LotreinSubmitted3 years ago(+1)

Yes, I agree. I have characters in the center of attention, but I also tried to reveal the local setting as much as possible. These are quite interrelated things.

This is my first completed game in 3.5 months of experience in Rpg Maker. Therefore, along the way, I also have to learn a lot of things. Including parallax mapping, which I used to try to avoid. But now I realized that the technical framework of the editor is too constraining for me :)

I hope you will like my game, at least in terms of the atmosphere, which I put the greatest emphasis on. An opinion about the game, even negative with arguments, is welcome :)

I will also try to play your game and the games of other participants in my free time. Time to apply my meager knowledge of English :D

My game had the same issue. If you ignored dialogue and just rushed to the end, it is a 5 minute game. If you take your time and really explore everything, it can end up being far over an hour. I sort of tried to fix it by including buffs. I later changed it to stacking buffs where every 10 minutes, you get a stronger buff applied to your party so that after 30 minutes, you can beat the game easily. I did forget to disable that buff from the harder difficulties though...

LotreinSubmitted3 years ago(+1)

Yes, I also have a couple of small problems that I didn't have time to fix in a hurry. But not critical.

Oh, and I remembered one more mega-complicated thing... This is to come up with a name for the game! I was close to the fact that the word "star" also got into the name of my game, like half of all participants :)

AI SinSubmitted3 years ago(+2)

Yeah, I named my game following the same naming rule I use for the other contests of this type, but I was tempted to throw Star in there and call it a day. You have no idea how close I was to naming my game: "That one Touch The Star Game Contest Game That Used Star In the Name So Many Times That They Hit and Broke the Character Limit Because Of Their Obsession With Adding Stars To Their ******* Title"

KracySubmitted3 years ago(+1)

As this is my first RPG MAKER game, finding all nuances of how to do certain things in program was really time consuming. But I still learn a lot, and that's best! I don't use any plugins, beacuse I wanted to try what "vanilla" RPG MAKER can do, and I can say that even without them possibilities are extensive. ( But I still don't know how to center text in boxes ^^" )

R4YN4 Tiyaga GrimaudeSubmitted3 years ago(+1)

Well congrats on getting the first one out! This is my first published game, but I 've been playing around since MV.
Plugins are definitely a different situation, learning the core engine is best so you can make sure you get the right plugin for the job.
From what I looked at your project so far(I'll play it later) it looks pretty good!

MeowsticksSubmitted3 years ago(+1)

There were so many hurdles I don't even know the biggest one lol.

Just to name a few:

-The length. I 100% planned for my game to be short and under and hour. I.e. it would be a game that I myself could beat in like 30 minutes so that new players would be around the hour mark but, uh, that wasn't the case. It took my way longer. So, uh, oops. Don't regret it at all if the game needs to be longer than an hour it should. If I lose points because the ending isn't judged, then that's how it is.

-The time limit. This is my first ever game jam. Heck, this is my first ever game I've finished (my other game is forever developing). One month feels like a long time a few days in, but feels so short when you've only got a week left and still so much left to do. If I ever do a Game Jam again, I am 100% managing my time better now that I have experience with just how strict it is.

-Myself. I get ideas for a game in my head and I just want to do them. So many things could have saved time if I didn't want to add a certain thing but nope that's not how I work. The worst part is I don't know if players will even notice or pay much attention to the smaller details. Maybe they will? Either way, I remember Steel from Studio Blue saying that a Game Jam really shows what you as a developer focuses on in development, and I definitely focus on the smaller details rather than the bigger picture.

LotreinSubmitted3 years ago(+2)

Everything I read is like it's about me.

I especially want to note the moment with small details. For example, I was busy with such small details in GIMP, even to the point that I rearrange books on the shelves in ready-made assets of some bookcases. Although I could have spent this time on something more substantial.

Time budgeting, time budgeting. I struggle a lot with ambitions and have ended up spending a lot on frivolous things like endgame abilities when I should have focused on finishing the core loop first. I made it anyways, and if I had to do it over again, I’d limit mechanics to the scope of a 1-2 hour loop.

KracySubmitted3 years ago(+1)

Yeah, I got the same... Doing all small addons instead of focusing on core in first place.

OpalablueSubmitted3 years ago

Looking at my own game, I spent about a week on the mechanics of the game and testing the mechanics before I even started building the first map. I literally just had a bunch of random events and a blank map to test mechanics. Then I built the game in like 3 days, lol. I did add additional content after, but yeah... I had basically all the mechanics set up ahead of time, including some mechanics I removed because I ended up not using them. It probably would've been faster if I had made the game first and then dealt with the mechanics after, lol.

RPG Maker Crashing for no reason and battle design where my greatest enemies lol

Crashes and Lag, the greatest enemies of humanity.

To the point that I almost added them to my game. Almost. (I'm not joking. The only reason I didn't was because my artist didn't have time to make the sprites).

mobiusclimberSubmitted3 years ago

YESSS! The crashes took away so much time from me... And making a unique battle system is difficult in the span of a month.
I'll be sure to check out your game later, it looks beautiful!

mobiusclimberSubmitted3 years ago (1 edit)

1) Lack of free time, combined with procrastination and not portioning my time correctly.

2) Having never used MZ and thinking it would be like MV. It is, but the plugins are a bit different and I never figured out how to use most of them correctly.

3) Lack of resources/assets. I tried to use RTP, but a lot of the characters I wanted to use were missing either sv-battler or sv-enemy graphics. I tried making some characters in the generator but that was also pretty limited.

It's weird, but I had a ridiculous amount of trouble trying to get plugins to work. I bought MZ specifically bc it handles plugins better than MV does. But I had a hard time figuring out the Help files for a lot of the plugins, I couldn't copy commands out of the Help files (unless I wanted to open the actual file up and copy from there), and a lot of times things just didn't work the way they "should." I wasted a lot of time trying to do things that never worked.

Starline ArtsSubmitted3 years ago (1 edit)

Yup that's one of the reasons I tried my best not to use plugins, only used one to skip the battle/escape menu.
I always found it easier to work on it when I wanted to. There were nights where I would go for hours and get nothing done and then there were times I completed more work in an hour.

I'll check your game when I have time!

Thanks I'll check yours out as well.

As for plugins, I really wish MZ had the ability to do fog effects and font changing manually without plugins or writing code. Using more than one font in a game seems pretty typical, so it should really be easier to do. I also wish there was an easier way of expanding on the balloon icons. In the 3DS version of RM, you could use any item icon as a balloon, which really makes the game more expressive without having to make a bunch of animations and makes finding treasure in chests more exciting (since the MC can hold the icon above their head like Link does).

Miha3 years ago

Working on the game always created a constant stream of hurdles. Which was expected since I actually don't know what I'm doing ^^
But I was most surprised that correcting grammar and spelling errors took me several days of rewriting and pondering... Being a non native speaker is suffering I guess...

As a native speaker I still had grammar and spelling issues as well. They're easy to miss when you're on a deadline!

Austin T3 years ago

Tilesets. I didn't have much trouble finding the Assets Standards page so I knew how to arrange my tiles, but I really struggled with creating a tileset that didn't look "cut off" at certain positions. It was kinda hard to accommodate the way RPG Maker's auto-tiler cuts things up. Ultimately blew through a couple days on that and didn't end up with anything to show for it.

MeowsticksSubmitted3 years ago

Why not try parallaxing? I find that's the best way to construct maps alongside an image editor. Personally paralaxing gives me a better feeling of control.

SmashArtistSubmitted3 years ago(+1)

It was a mix of struggles for me, firstly when designing and implementing mechanics the lack of plugins brought up some interesting challenges for me.
I had decided to make my game with 0 plugins, so some features got scrapped or would take too much time to implement so were unfinished or not included. (I actually managed to stick with my 0 plugin goal though!)

My own motivation would go up and down as I tried tackling different aspects of my game. I had some really high days and some really low ones. Some days I didn't work at all because I was so stressed. There was a lot of balancing my own mental health with the progression of the game.

Lastly, the biggest struggle for me was the mapping. Just getting myself to make the base shape of maps was a struggle. I've always had a hard time with maps and level design as I rarely get ideas for them, so I work off a blank canvas most of the time with no direction. I also wanted to make my mapping allow for more exploration then I'm used to which was another challenge. I'm not certain I did a good job with my maps, but at least the game is playable and I got through it. :)

I also went with the 0 plugin route. It was rough at some points because certainly things would have been more efficient, but it also kind of helped in a way because it narrowed down what could/couldn't be done and just let me focus on certain things within reach. Plus it helps stops feature bloat by just adding plugin after plugin lol.

DamyanSubmitted3 years ago

I only have 1 plugin but it's a custom one to skip the fight/escape in the battles.

Mapping is definetly my weak spot as well. So what I did was have 1 map and used images from unsplash(a free image site) as backgrounds for the other areas. This way I only need to focus on 1 map and the rest are just scenes that playout over a parallax(shameless plug but check my game to see what I mean.) But looking at your game's page maybe that wouldn't work too well with it's visual style.

For me it was time constraints simply because i didn't start until 3 days before the submission date. I'm happy with how it turned out but if I had mustered up the courage to join the jam earlier I feel it would have been a much more polished game.

SmashArtistSubmitted3 years ago

Wow! Just 3 days? That's quite an achievement!

miphorimSubmitted3 years ago

To get a base game down in 3 days is a feat I hope to accomplish sooner or later! I definitely have to check your game out!

Definitely time management for me. I spent a week coming up with the story, and another week and a half for the graphics, which only left me a week to program everything. Needless to say, I didn't get to the end of the story and had to cut things short. I didn't even get to use all of my assets :(

MsLillySubmitted3 years ago

Despite all that you have a good looking product, from what I can see from the screenshots. It is disappointing when you have some assets that you never end up using.

My terrible time management skills... and stress induced panic.

Like, my gamepage says I submitted it 26 minutes before the deadline, but it's really closer to 10. I just started setting up the page real quick first so I didn't have to think about it when I finally got the game completely finished. (Not that that helped at all since I forgot to turn on the move event that would have brought the player to the last section of the game.. TTATT)

Also battle balancing. Honestly the battles are a mess. Partly cause I had the "bright" idea of doing kinda custom classes and skills with way smaller numbers to make it easier to balance. And then bad time management happened cause I hate doing battle balancing so... Giant mess.