Wen 丨 Lu Sanwu Review 丨 Spring Resignation
Typography 丨roa
Last time there were many people in the background asking about butter in the background.
So let's talk about the words that the old drivers on STEAM will really search for, and you may not believe it, it is "RPG production master". That's right, it's the thing that once produced the top story game maker like "To the Moon" and has been out for nearly 30 years.
And when you play a good game, patch Up Dula Lang, hold the mouse in your right hand, and skillfully unscrew the Nutrition Express with your left hand — you'll find that their pixel style looks retro as if you're back to 30 years ago, the golden age when JRPGs swept the world.
In fact, their origin is in these 15 "hot products", and they are still at the top of the hot list all year round. The person who built this electronic gentle township is RPG Maker, Chinese "RPG production master".
RPG Maker (hereinafter referred to as RM) was born in 1995, originally only for Japan domestic game development tools, but the RM95/2000 version was cracked by the famous Russian hackers and released, the world's teenagers who have played "Final Fantasy" have downloaded the cracked version of RM, in a vain attempt to achieve their own "Final Fantasy".
So why did the rolling tide of history make young people choose RM for their first game over other game development tools?
If you're still dreaming of a "game dream" of your own, then I've got to pour cold water on you. If you want to develop a game independently, art and code are indispensable. In reality, even if you only master one of them, you are the children of other people's families in the eyes of the elders during the New Year, and the sought-after goods of the People's Park Blind Date.
Advise you to give up
But RM is different, its threshold is so low that you don't even need to have art skills, you don't need to write code, you can use it to figure out your first game, and then fucking game dreams.
You don't need to know art, in the early years, RM established its own public library after the developer directly pickpocketed the art materials of other games after the copyright dispute, and now "creating" a character of its own on RM is almost like a miracle warmth.
From the RM official website, the Chinese is a machine flip
You don't need to be able to write code, and in the early years of RM you also needed to know a language called Ruby, and at RMXP you could import scripts that others shared on forums — the kind that covered all your needs. Today, you don't even have to move the mouse.
From the RM website
Such nanny-level service and virtually no threshold also make RM notorious. The first is the repetition of the material, even in the RM butter I bought in 2022, I can often see the duplicate material.
For example, the building that you see in the game with the "INN" sign must be a hotel, and I have not seen the second one so far.
And this kind of character dressed in blue and purple is either a businessman or a boss somewhere.
You can see him in the RM game on a variety of occasions where transactions are likely to occur, and his level of engagement is comparable to that of Catherine, the replicant receptionist in Protos.
The extent to which RM games are flooded, some people even ironically say that it is "a game that can be done in 10 minutes".
But on the other hand, RM's performance is extreme, "To the moon" is a masterpiece developed with RM, and even won the 2011 GameSpot "Best Screenplay Award".
But in the end, under the altar of "To the moon", there are countless "debuts" and "game dreams" wreckage.
Therefore, RM is not popular today, whether it is graphics or gameplay, the only thing that can make some effort is the plot.
But as Dior Brandu said, "The wicked have the savior of the wicked," and as juan Kautez, the godfather of the Yala guerrillas, put it, "The tools are used correctly, and the results are multiplied with less." "Some of rm's features inadvertently cater to many of the needs of butter developers.
It's hard to ask for
You can't just think of butter and think only of Donadona or Subverse.
After all, making butter will be hit with an iron fist, it is difficult to get any investment, so in most cases it can only be produced at low cost; those who have art or code ability make a lot of money, who will be thankless to make butter? So the only thing left for butter developers to roll is how to get the astringency right, so RM is almost the optimal solution.
An RM butter that makes "great" has at least these elements:
The first to bear its "rush" is the defeated CG, which is also the most raw grass and the most representative existence in butter. In normal games, you want to unlock CG to win battles, but in butter it is the opposite, and you sometimes need to deliberately lose battles to unlock paid content.
Faced with such a divisive choice, it is clear that "calling for companions" is the safe choice. But you have to deliberately send the protagonist away.
Well, after that, you can make up your own brains. In fact, CG after the defeat of different enemies accounts for the vast majority of "paid CG".
This is already pretty good
But these CGs, you can't expect it to be how good it is, most of the painting style is not beautiful, the proportion of the human body is also problematic, the same manufacturer still has the same suspicion of using the same protagonist in different works, but it is basically not so much to care about the head.
In addition to the defeat CG, there are special plot CG, which are usually triggered after the boss is defeated, or after certain conditions are met. Essentially, it is a specific defeat CG, or a "transitional" CG after reaching a certain stage.
Don't think that butter is only punched, butter also needs some means to "kill time" to "get value for money". In addition to brushing materials to brush money, astringent things in RM butter can also be brushed, converted into values, generally in the form of "depravity" - depravity even needs to trigger a specific event to achieve the stage of rise, if not trigger special events, more astringency can not continue to advance and unlock.
Butter is not only punched, but punching must be the main purpose. So is there any way to achieve both the purpose of rushing and advancing the progress of the game at the same time? Remember this carefully crafted building, which is not only astringent, but also gives you a lot of in-game currency that you can't brush through normal means.
As mentioned earlier, the value associated with astringency in RM butter will change, and correspondingly, the acceptance of astringency by the protagonist in the game will also show a change from resistance to initiative. When you brush the fall value to the point of not moving, think back to what the protagonist looked like in the beginning... That's when dopamine bombards your good sphere exponentially.
Tearful eyes
Of course, there are always people trying to make it easier for themselves. Trying to avoid all astringency in a game designed with astringency everywhere can not help but be said to be a challenge. Many developers have left room for such players, perhaps one of the few gentleness in this pixel world full of malice towards the protagonist.
When you've cleared a certain line in butter, the game's developers will give you a chance to unlock all the CGs directly to make up for the regret that you missed an event, just like the "next time" of Muraguchi Xiaoli when you go out, giving you a pink drop of memories.
To be honest, like the RM game itself, RM butter has no shortage of dung, and there are not many elements and careful development. But those rms butters that have been used with heart can really give people a feeling of returning to basics, and the classic fun of JRPG has not fallen at all.
The most classic attribute restraint system in JRPG combat has been retained, and the boss has a little bit of strategy elements during the battle; as the battle increases, the protagonist becomes stronger in addition to becoming more astringent, and the moment the blood bar is empty, the satisfaction is no less than the old cold leg in the old man ring to clear a piece of finger monster.
RM butter is also not short of the fun of collecting. As your protagonist becomes stronger and more astringent, you keep unlocking new areas, new items, unlocking new CGs, new "achievements", and when you finally stand in the "retrospective room" where all the events are lit up, you laugh, and your cows laugh.
Of course, the scariest thing about RM butter is that it is the presence I have ever seen, with the strongest ability to break the fourth wall.
In the beginning, someone went to great lengths to fight monsters to avoid defeat, only to "awaken" true happiness after one defeat and begin to deliberately lose — is this you off-screen, or is it the protagonist you control?
"Since you are pursuing excitement, follow through to the end." In order to pursue more astringency, you start to constantly go astringent. Look at the number of "fallen values", does its rising also apply to you?
Be careful, when you play the RPG master into the butter master, you may have become a real astringent master before you know it...