aw man low blow.  that is getting a little personal.

yay this new GW is cool beat that 2002-2004 GW

yeah man, take that GW from when most of us were 12-14, we've not grown as a community at all!!!


oh wait FUCK TIME PASSED

this is the problem man, you are begging for the return of a site from the past, sure you could say that different people are always coming in but they're kind of not!  most of us have been around since then and we grew up, have completely different lives and have completely different interests.  rm2k is not one of those interests for most of us anymore.  when the main bits of the community stops giving a shit, it is impossible to tailor the rest of the site to people on the outskirts.  unless the people who give a fuck or two about the community as a whole care, you can't keep a site going.

also keep in mind dudes, there's no reason that an rm2k game couldn't be featured on the mainsite as it is.  after all, it's an indie games site.  the problem is that they are universally so awful that nobody would feature them on a site.  even the 'good' rm2k games are just good for rm2k games, when you start comparing them to other indie games or even professional games (indie games are to the point now where it's fair to do so to some extent, there are a lot of indie games that give professional ones a run for their money), they don't look so fantastic anymore.  there's no rule against the mainsite not having rm2k games, but don't expect it to happen until something legitimately amazing comes along.  if you think you've found that game, then perhaps submit an article to the mainsite?????  unfortunately i don't see this happening anytime soon.

let's assume that there are a handful of amazing rm2k games that are so damn good you can't believe it.  okay, great, put those on the site.  there is absolutely no denying however that the huge, HUGE majority of these games are absolute shit.  what are you asking for is a database of shit.  you want gw to clog up its entire site with any 11 year old's game that is completely awful to play.  what is the point of this???  if your game is so damn good send it into the site as a regular indie game!  there's got to be some level of quality control, or else we just end up with a site full of shit.

also:

nightblade you look completely retarded when you answer a post with a fucking image macro

What's really awesome now is indie games for the iphone.  Then we can play them while we're in class or at work so we can become mindless idiots.  love indie iphone games.

yeah man who would ever want to play legitimately good, well designed indie games on the iphone when we could be playing a generic jrpg made by someone who's not old enough to drive???

seriously man you're saying these games are stupid because they're on the iphone???  monkey island is on the iphone too, does that make it mindless too?  i can't even think of an answer to this that's not fuck you sorry

i am not really sure why you guys even complain about GW not having RM resources / games when it's been shafted for over 5 years. it made sense in the beginning but any effort to move RM to the forefront as it used to be has been largely shot down by the community. the vast majority of people interested in RM visit sites like RMN for development purposes. neophyte said this and no one really took any notice of it.

i also want to clear up this whole thing about RM's bad image and why hardly anyone takes it seriously, no one really seems to understand what is going on. RM games don't actually penetrate into the public in any meaningful way. there's always the top rpg maker games everyone on obscure internet forums talk about but it very rarely, if ever, gets outside of RM communities. on the flipside, you see MMF, game maker, AGS, and pretty much any other more advanced development tool out there having games that win legitimate independent awards, are talked about in the gaming press, and actually get interest outside of insider communities. this almost never happens with RM games.

for instance, take a look at the TIGDB, which features all kinds of games (including RM games http://db.tigsource.com/browse?engine=rpg-maker ). notice how that out of 637 games on the DB, only 11 are from all of the RMs. none of the other RM games people rave about were strong enough to penetrate into a larger audience beyond the games listed there (generally speaking). i've played and enjoyed some RPG maker games, but i understand why they have such a tiny slice of appeal in the public eye, and it's not just because they are typically the standard JRPG fare.

it's because the more successful developers eventually dump RM. they learn it's not a suitable tool for more advanced development and move on. this doesn't mean RM is incapable of making a great game, you absolutely can in the technical sense, but without a developer to make it happen, the amount of great games will be extremely low. in order for a great game to happen in RM, you need someone smart enough to make a good game, but stubborn enough to stick with a tool that is not suited for making such a game. we've all seen neat tech demos, and even emulations of functionality from real games (ie. vanit's ff7 menu) using RM. we know it can DO THINGS. this all has to do with time however. most people who become an advanced RM user and actually pursue their project to the end eventually jump ship because it will take much quicker to make their game in another engine. vanit spent easily 4x as long making a menu system, that is very cumbersome technically (it has initial load time for the menu for christ sake) and is extremely hard to adapt. if you look at the more advanced engines, you can accomplish such a system many times faster and actually be able to adapt and expand the system later if you need to.

i will say that with the newer RM products the chance of better games coming out has increased because they improved many of the flaws that older versions had, but i still don't think the interface and general functionality of the engines are good enough to attract the serious developers. in the end though, you can't keep defending RPG maker for being "up there" with the rest of indie games when it has almost no appeal outside RM communites. good developers abandon it eventually, and it's mostly become a stepping stone. so while you hardcore RM users would like to think the public is shunning RM, it's really the developers turning their back on it. RM has earned it's image as a highly amateur tool because of this.

sort of adding on to that, one of the reasons that rm games are only seen as so good among the rm developers is because of this feeling of "this person can do better than i can".  in the rm community, any game that is more impressive than yours is amazing to you, because you understand the work that went into it.  however the problem is that the community is unable to separate this feeling of "wow now i understand how hard it was for you to pull that off" from judging how good or bad a game is.  this is what leads to the incestuous nature in the first place, they start praising that awful game, then someone who is worse than you praises your awful game, and nobody judges them as if they were actual games!  if you go up to a stranger who likes games but has never heard of rpg maker and had them play even one of the better rm games, they would probably not like it so much.  they would actually be judging it based on other games they've played, and not based on other rpgmaker games they've played.  it makes no sense to only judge a game based on other games developed in a similar way, because the player is only going to know about the end result.  spore had interesting ways of handling things from a programming perspective, but as someone who just buys the game and plays it, none of that matters!  i could make a movie with a certain type of camera, but i can't judge that film only by comparing it to other films made with that kind of camera.  until people start comparing rm2k games to other indie games (i will be fair enough to leave out professional games here, since they aren't usually one-man jobs), they aren't going to grow and will never become good.  but, it's really more like gz said, where once someone who makes rm games does start to grow, they leave rm.

Yeah, what GZ and Vellfare said is pretty much the point I was trying to get across but I guess I'm not that eloquent at 2 in the morning. I also feel really stupid for staying up so late to have a debate with a 23 years old guy that still uses that and reply with a fucking image macro.

indie games (as in re-makes of bejeweled, pong, and pinball).

This is a VERY accurate description.

But even if it would be, I would rather play all these remakes of pong than something that has everything from its graphics to the plotline recycled from 10 different old snes games, poorly put together with a toolkit that just cripples whatever little hope there ever was for the game.

This is a VERY accurate description.

But even if it would be, I would rather play all these remakes of pong than something that has everything from its graphics to the plotline recycled from 10 different old snes games, poorly put together with a toolkit that just cripples whatever little hope there ever was for the game.

man yeah that sentence completely boggled my mind it was so dumb but come to think of it i would rather play any pinball clone than the average rm game, because it's hard to make a bad pinball game, whereas it's hard to make a GOOD rpg

Some people may say "Well its changed over the last 6 years" there's still an underline concept... newbies are coming here for help with their games, and veterans are coming here to freshen up and improve their current skills (such as spriting, scripting, map making, etc)

uh no, a handful of new people are coming here to post their games to get endless amounts of empty praise and veterans have either moved on or are hardly there at all, and i see almost nobody asking for help or doing anything fresh whatsoever

unless you are literally in the past then idk how you can think that gw as it stands today is anything like what you just said

GW has been (for the short time I've been here) a place for beginners and pros to come together and get into the grand view of Game Design...
Some people may say "Well its changed over the last 6 years" there's still an underline concept... newbies are coming here for help with their games, and veterans are coming here to freshen up and improve their current skills (such as spriting, scripting, map making, etc)

I kinda wish it was like that but it's not.

just interesting to note that the game in your sig was made with game maker.
just sayin 

Hey, I never said I had a thing against game maker, just I support the fact that RPG maker should still be used.
And I used to hang out in the resource forum (until the huge update, when I took a break) and my spriting went from completely useless to decent (might not be a great improvement, but Ocean and them really helped me improve.)
I still see some places were people are telling me how to improve (take a look at encryption in the coding section) there are still vets here who are trying to help people out, you just have to learn to filter through the junk.

there's a difference between you as an individual finding help when you ask for it and GW being a place where tons of people go out of their way to come for help, this is what you made it sound like

her point is that you're using youself as an idividual example as if lots of people are doing it

they're not. it's a few

 

Rpgmaker 95/2k/3 are all dying, XP is still thriving. But I do think we should focus on more genuine Indie games now. Aquaria, Machinarium(???) etc.