Pandora Pandora Rpg Maker

[Near_Kstor]

I guess everyone here already made something using this famous app.
Back when I was in school, I loved being able to make my own RPGs using the RPG Maker for windows.

I take it is feasible to create such app to Pandora? It would be very nice to have compatibility with the formats supported by the original RPG Maker, so we could have an immense lib from the start (including, scenarios, chars, sprites, monsters, etc).

Nice huh? A Pandora app made so anyone could make Pandora RPG Games...

Perhaps we could form a group of programmers to achieve this... I can help if we do it in Python (or Java, but that would be sloooow)

 

[samuraicrow]

You'll probably have to start from scratch. RPG Maker is closed-source and IIRC, it probably uses proprietary file formats as well. You might look into Ika instead. You'll only have to port the OpenGL calls to OpenGL-ES it looks like.

 

[Near_Kstor]

Oh... are you sure we can't even use the file formats from the original RPG Maker?
The great deal here was the ability to use everything the RM Community have already developed...

 

[lulzfish]

No, RPG Maker is quite proprietary. It might be possible to reverse-engineer their file formats, but that would be very time-consuming and at least somewhat illegal.

This is why you should not program anything in any tool called "* Maker".

 

[samuraicrow]

You can use the graphics in PNG, BMP, Jpeg, and so on. Likewise you can use sound files in WAV, MP3, Ogg Vorbis, and so on. The maps and other stuff are proprietary to RPG Maker and won't work on the Pandora.

 

[Jourdy288]

Your best bet ATM is to learn a programming language. I'm learning C++, I recommend it since it's pretty universally accepted. Unfortunately, I wanted a simple RPG maker for the Pandora too, but as was said before, it doesn't exist.
Perhaps you could be the one to make it!

 

[Tensuke]

Actually, there is a project in development trying to recreate RMXP and expand on it, and there was a project that was trying to recreate game.exe(the game interpreter) so you could play the game from any OS, given that the actual game is made up of pictures, audio, and .rxdata files. The first project is slow, and the second one died I think. But if you can code well, you could make an open source game interpreter that lets you play games in Linux or on ARM devices. Unfortunately, that's pretty much never going to happen, so you better learn to code something.

 

[puppydee]

Didn't I read somewhere that the guys at Platinum Arts where interested in porting Sandbox to the pandora? It's a cool 3d game maker that's pretty user friendly for people like me who haven't a clue how to code and the quality of the games you can create are really stunning. There's some mention of a RPG mode on there home page which reads "New RPG Mode! Spells featured are fireball, lantern/light, and invisibility" I will most definatly have a play around with it if it's available for the Pandora. On the homepage they say it's used by kids in schools so how hard can it be.
For those that haven't heard of it here's there homepage http://sandboxgamemaker.com/

Also there's another game maker called Game Editor 1.3.9, it's for making 2d platform games but since we're talking about game makers I thought I'd mention it. It's also open source aswell going by there website (Not sure how open though) and it'll run on different platforms including Windows (95, 98, Me, NT, 2000, 2003, XP, Vista), Linux, Pocket PC, Handheld PC, GP2X and Windows Mobile-based Smartphones so I'm sure it won't take much to get it running on the Pandora. It's not free though, that's why I wonder just how open the source it really is. Never used it myself so I don't know how user friendly it but since they have there own forum I sure someone could help you out. I know most of you will already know about this game maker but I thought I'd mention it for any newbies with little coding experience that fancy making a game.
Here is there homepage http://game-editor.com/

It will be interesting to see how many gane makers will be available for the pandora and how many games will be made using the game makers

 

[CyruzDraxs]

You'll probably have to start from scratch. RPG Maker is closed-source and IIRC, it probably uses proprietary file formats as well. You might look into Ika instead. You'll only have to port the OpenGL calls to OpenGL-ES it looks like.

ika is great. I would also recommend it. It's fairly easy to use and far less restrictive than apps like RPG Maker.

 

[atomicthumbs]

ika is great. I would also recommend it. It's fairly easy to use and far less restrictive than apps like RPG Maker.

Can ika be used to make non-RPG games (like a Mega Man-style platformer)?

 

[DasFool]

ika is great. I would also recommend it. It's fairly easy to use and far less restrictive than apps like RPG Maker.

Can ika be used to make non-RPG games (like a Mega Man-style platformer)?

It would appear that way.

 

[gavie]

Can ika be used to make non-RPG games (like a Mega Man-style platformer)?

It would appear that way.

From the Ika FAQ

What is ika?

ika (all lowercase) is a generic gaming engine geared (only slightly) towards making console style RPGs. It's already been proven quite able to make puzzle/platform/what-have-you as well.

Sounds very interesting indeed!

 

[DeadName]

I'm having a bit of difficulty getting ika to run in Linux. Anyone else having problems? h34r:

 

[Exophase]

There are tons of game creation systems, with a few being open source. Most failed to take off in any spectacular way. I haven't followed ika, although I remember the guy who made it back from before he did.. but from what I can see it doesn't look like more than a handful of things were made with it. I was working on a GCS several years ago, but the more I realized that people usually don't want to actually do anything using these things the less I was compelled to continue. That, and the most popular ones like GameMaker and RPGMaker were already pretty competent. But those are closed source.

Other open source GCS's include Sphere and Verge (of which ika was once a derivative). The latter in particular should have more games for it. If you're okay with something more graphically simplistic there's also MegaZeux which I'm sure will get a Pandora port, especially since you'll be able to easily edit games on it as well.

I think one of the reasons why RPGMaker is popular isn't really because of its game making capabilities but because of the supplied assets you can rip from it. The original thread post seems to support this. Game creation programs are often little more than glorified game engine libraries with a map editor externally. You still have to do almost as much programming, in the end.

 

[mindlord]

Really, though... Isn't this what PyGame was created for? To replace all these "Game-Maker" do-dads?

 

[samuraicrow]

Really, though... Isn't this what PyGame was created for? To replace all these "Game-Maker" do-dads?

In conjunction with Phil's pyGame Utilities it might.

 

[bzar]

PyGame is great and all, but it really doesn't replace a game creation system. With such systems it's usually easy to get going by just going through menus and figuring things out, but with PyGame you first need to learn to program the language. Of course you still need a scripting language for the more complicated parts even with a GCS, but that comes into the picture much later. For example, none of the GCS I know of have you write your own animation routines (not that it's difficult, just boilerplate). So for a beginner, a GCS is much easier, because it guides the user by limiting the options and showing them to the user. With an actual programming language you don't get that level of support.

 

[Shaun199three]

Does anyone know any good tutorials for Pygame cause the tutorials I've been looking at don't give too much information.

 

[bzar]

Does anyone know any good tutorials for Pygame cause the tutorials I've been looking at don't give too much information.

Do you have any specific topics in mind? Learning how to make games with pygame actually divides into several subtopics, like

• Python
• Game programming
• Pygame modules

which in turn are composed of subtopics of their own. In most cases game programming concepts are the same regardless of the language or library you use. You use these concepts to structure your idea and then implement it in your selected language using something like SDL or pygame to handle the low-level stuff. Sorry if you already knew all this, but i had game programming experience before I got into pygame, and I've done fine with just the reference documentation and the few tutorials at pygame.org.

What I'm trying to say, is that if you need a tutorial on non-pygame-specific game programming issue, you can do with one written for another library/language (for example lazyfoo's SDL tutorials) and implement the same stuff with python/pygame. It would be nice to have all those great game programming tutorials for python/pygame, because it's easy to learn, though.

 

[geckojsc]

When the Pandora gets Flash support, I reckon MyGameBuilder would be a good replacement for some of those game makers. Also how feasable would it be to make a piece of software like Scratch (or even end up with Scratch ported [edit] ah no, Scrtch isn't available for Linux)? I think that's good because it attempts to break the bridge between programming and using a game creator.