On ready-made RPG engines (or should I come up with my own?)

[rockman_x_2002]

Looking for a little bit of advice here.

 

I've been looking forward to finally being able to get back into programming as a hobby (I took a hiatus from that after completing my masters project this past May, along with other thing that have come up that have prevented me thus far from doing so). For a long time I've had an RPG project on the table for which I and some friends have developed two stories (the game is proposed to be a trilogy at this point, with the possibility of future expansion later on). Along with the story assets, we have also developed the appropriate characters and scenarios, as well as a full script of how the game should progress. In essence, we have a living, breathing design document on the table.

 

This means that we are at the point of actually coding the monster now. Over the years, I've been taught that I should always make use of tools already availble when possible, especially if an open-source solution exists that is free for commercial use (which for us would be ideal in that we hope to take the game commercial in an entry-level sort of method). The "free" part is especially important because all of this is merely a hobby project at this point, based on a "pulled up by the bootstraps" type ideal where we really don't have the monetary backing right now to spend on the development phase of the project. Essentially this means any tools we use (compilers, graphics editors, etc.)

 

I've been searching around to see if I could find any RPG engines that are already out there (open-source, free for commercial use) that would fit the bill for our game, and while I have found a few open-source engines out there, none of them seem to really fit what we have in mind. At this point, we are aiming to resurrect the old 2D style retro-RPG, something along the graphical style of Secret of Mana on the SNES. So far the engines I have tested do not work in widescreen mode, will only operate in lower resolutions, or run too slowly in high resolution. Also, many of these engines are free only for non-commercial use.

 

So I turn then to the AtariAge community to see if anyone knows of any type of open-source RPG engines that might work for our project, or if I might be best off starting from scratch and writing a custom engine for the game that we have in mind. If so, I have a few tomes on the subject of game programming, but none of them specific on the subject of programming an RPG. As always, any advice is much appreciated.

[Impaler_26]

Have you tried the RPG-Maker yet? Some of the games made with this are pretty good, like Vampires Dawn for example.

[rockman_x_2002]

I have looked into it, and it seems like a good tool to use. However, it's a product that you have to purchase and, right now, we're looking to use all free tools. Barring finding an available free RPG toolkit of some kind, our other choice is to custom-build an engine using C++ (using either gcc or Visual C++ 2008 Express Ed. SP1) and the Allegro game development library.

 

We have VC++ setup with Allegro already, but it's not a big issue getting it setup for gcc either. It's a matter of choice on that. But we were hoping to use a pre-built open-source RPG engine if at all possible.

[johnny_boy]

I don't believe there's an easy answer. Perhaps you might consider using the Microsoft XNA tools. They seem to have a lot of momentum these days, a healthy community, and increasing art/code assets.

[+karri]

Allegro is a good choice. There is one multiplayer maze game "Hero Quest" out there written in Allegro. It parses game files and there is already tons of games available for it.

 

I spent a few month porting it to Atari Lynx. It is possible to do the port as the cc65 tools are pretty good and all the logic was written in C. I still hope to get some extra time to finish my Lynx port.

 

The Hero Quest is a re-make of Gremlins adventure game with the same name. For the Lynx I was changing the top-down game to a pseudo 3d isotropic game.

Top down game.

Original Gremlin game.

What it looks when ported to Atari Lynx.

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Karri

Edited January 29, 2009 by karri