I recently came across this and it looks cool. But I was wondering has anyone here made any games with it? Is it a useful way to make rpgs or is it a waste of time? Are there any good rpgs that were made with this? Any tips for someone who has never used this before?
It’s pretty cool if you got the time to make a serious game (and don’t reuse the default sprites/music). At least the previous versions were. The Way is the best RPGM game I know of. Try looking into RPG Maker communities for more tutorials, games etc.
I actually finished a couple of RM2K games, and did quite a bit of work on an RMXP game (before RL forced me to abandon the effort, as it seems I don’t have time in my life anymore for such time-consuming hobbies).
If you have the ability to learn Ruby, the software’s scripting engine, and can make or find decent tiles and sprites, it’s really, really good. Everything except the most fundamental I/O, graphics, and sound routines is done in Ruby and exposed for you to edit, modify, and add to to your heart’s content. The default library that comes with it is obviously oriented toward making RPGs, but there’s nothing stopping from modding it into just about anything.
That said, the Ruby engine they use is very slow - it was designed for scripting web-pages, not games, and its garbage collection especially will bog down considerably when dealing with large, frequently-manipulated data sets, or doing large I/O operations. It doesn’t help that the default library it comes with isn’t written very efficiently - especially with map objects which have quite a bit of redundant code.
Still, next to doing it all yourself in C or C++, it’s the best thing I’ve ever seen for making hobbyist games. Well worth the price tag, IMO.