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[ekt]

I have this very young cousin fond of rpg/j-rpg who begs me to help him develop one.
He lacks in talent, constancy and attention span like any normal fourteen year old while I am old and sure af we won't go anywhere.
But he is also the only relative who shares with me the passion for video games
And I think it might be a formative occasion anyway, at least to show him that making video games is a strenuous job.

I'm a developer for work, and develop games in the free time (intially my own c++ engine, now mainly unity)
I'm not afraid to write code, but I don't have the time nor the energy to start from scratch.

So my question is, what is the fastest way to come to a result today?
At the time there was RPG Maker. Is it still the top or is it any better?
I saw a framework named ORK for unity but I didn't investigate.

The plan would be to have a story that end in three scenes.
He would draw art and write the story.
His last favorites games are IB, Mad Father, Which House and Misao (I don't even know one of them!)

thanks

[qMopey]

Wouldn't that be RPG Maker?

[-Ross]

You could try starting him on Bitsy. It's very very simple, probably too simple to meet his goals . . . but those are always too high anyway aren't they? You can learn it in about an hour, and it's pretty fun to play with and to push its boundaries. It may be a good thing to start with: Simple enough and fun to master in an afternoon but limited enough that he'll eventually be motivated to try something more advanced?

There's a tutorial here: http://www.clairemorleyart.com/a-bitsy-tutorial (with a sort of 'hall of fame' of Bitsy games at the end)

[ekt]

He would just draw art and write the story. I'd be the one to code/use an editor.
Since I don't have much time, I'm searching for the 'least effort' engine/framework

Bitsy seems a little 'too simple' though. It woyld be hard to have dialogs/combat like you'd expect from an rpg.
I aim to the same levele of what RPG Maker produces, but I just want to be sure if RPG Maker is still the way to go or if something better/easier came out

[Richard Kain]

What you want, is RPG Maker MV. VX Ace is decent, but it is outdated, doesn't have quite the features that you want from a modern engine, and isn't cross-platform. (a very important consideration in this day and age) Your best bet is to keep an eye on Steam, and wait for a decent sale. I got a copy of RPG Maker MV off of Steam for around $20. These sales happen with decent regularity. If you don't mind paying close to full price, you can just pony up for it now.

The current iteration of RPG Maker, MV, is a very capable system for constructing J-RPG style games with relatively little coding, and is extremely user-friendly. All the structures you may need for basic J-RPG mechanics are baked right into the default engine, and it even includes some very capable content creation builders to give you a shortcut on generating basic characters. The engine has decent flexibility for making changes, and the scripting is based on JavaScript, which is fairly easy to pick up. With only a few tutorials worth of learning, I was able to dig into the basic plug-in system and cook up a decent resolution-adjusting plug-in. Perhaps most important, MV has all sorts of export options. A game you develop with it can be ported to any standard OS, both major mobile platforms, and even web pages. (HTML5 support)

The community around it is enthusiastic, but not quite as large or as vocal as Unity's. On the plus side, there are plenty of community-generated plug-ins that are quite capable and help to extend the abilities of the engine. Most of these are free and/or open-source. And in terms of going from zero to full development, there is no better time-saver for the kind of game you are gunning for. RPG Maker MV will get you constructing classic 16-bit style RPGs very quickly, with a relatively shallow learning curve.

[ekt]

thanks for the detailed reply! I'll spend a little time with it and see where it goes

[Tattomoosa]

If you are doing the programming and are willing to spend some money it may be worth checking out some Unity assets. It looks like there's a couple that are fully-featured RPG setups.

Although, I think I'd still lean toward something like RPG maker and then not do the code, but help him through setting up the game logic himself. If he has an interest in game making this might be an opportunity to show him how rewarding coding can be.

I also want to suggest looking at the limiting but simple (and free/open source) OHRRPGCE. That's where I got my start making games, and it served as a pretty good introduction but probably will seem very dated and not intuitive to a 14 year old today.