Hello again, and good May Day to those whom it may concern!

This time I was thinking of opening up on the topic of choosing an engine, which understandably, has been an arduous undertaking due to the different pros and cons relating to each engine.

So far, I’ve consulted the main pixel artist on the matter, and we ended up with RPG Maker VX Ace. The choice is mostly due to the ease of use. Granted, the system has many limitations compared to, for example, Unity, which is a more versatile game engine, and is available to many more platforms than VX Ace, which is only available for Windows-based operating systems (for now at least).

The choice was ultimately narrowed down by the decision to make a game, rather than an engine. And the RPG Maker franchise seemed to offer close to everything that was needed for a nostalgic SNES -era RPG. There were a few choices to make, but ultimately the older versions got pegged out of the list due to inherent limitations of the engine to 16×16 pixel tilesets and 320×240 resolution for the screen (If you’ve ever forced yourself to watch YouTube on 240p, you know what this looks like.).

VX Ace seemed to have nearly everything needed from the get-go. A good example is parallax mapping, meaning that different parts of the game’s maps can be layered separately as an image to create objects that aren’t centered to the tileset system, thus allowing more freedom to the development.

The things that I personally found lacking, was the lack of side view combat, which was replaced by the older Dungeon Master style first person view. Further the character movement was tied to tile based horizontal and vertical movement. Both problems seemed easy enough to fix through re-writing the scripts associated, so the engine was decided upon.

As most other things such as concepts and storyboarding are close to done, the game can slowly start going from paper to actual digital form. As some great man once said, this might not be the beginning of the end, but it just might be the end of the beginning.

Thank you once again for sticking through the post. Here’s a concept picture of a Daitengu.Until next time!