RPG Tsukūru 95, as this new version was called, will look immediately familiar to anyone who has used any installment in the series since. It was subsequently followed up by a port to the Super Famicom in 1995, and an official sequel for PC-9801 in 1996 before the Japanese gaming sector finally decided to get in step with the West, and the next installment in the series made the jump to Microsoft Windows-based PCs. RPG Tsukūru Dante 98 set in place many of the basic formulas and techniques that RPG Maker still uses today: tile-based maps simplified, programming-free game creation built-in assets to get aspiring creators started straight away and an enthusiastic userbase. Tsukūru, incidentally, is a portmanteau made up of the Japanese word for “create” ( tsukuru) and the Japanese transcription of the English loan word “tool”, which became tsūru. Thus, the title of the first “real” installment in the series proper can be roughly translated as RPG Creation Tool Dante 98, which has quite reasonably been simplified to just RPG Maker in Western territories. It was 1992’s RPG Tsukūru Dante 98that, to many people, marked the birth of the modern RPG Maker series, however, the 98 of the title referring not to the year of release but instead to its home platform of the PC-9801. Early installments included Dungeon Manjirou, which allowed for the production of Wizardry-style first-peson dungeon crawlers, and the two Dante titles, which afforded its users the opportunity to create their own top-down RPGs that bore a passing resemblance to Falcom’s popular - and similarly enduring - Ys series, which we covered in detail last month. RPG Maker’s history actually extends all the way back to the late 1980s and early ’90s, when ASCII released a number of titles for the popular Japanese computer platforms of the time: NEC’s PC-88, and Microsoft’s MSX2. So what, exactly, has made this series such a firm fixture in the amateur development landscape for so many years now? Arm your chipsets, ready your battlers and cue up your BGM we’re going in. One such solution that has remained enduringly popular over the years is the RPG Maker series, initially developed by ASCII and subsequently handed over to Enterbrain, a subsidiary of Kadokawa Corporation, for the more recent installments. Over the years, there have been a number of solutions for aspiring game designers to put together at the very least convincing prototypes of the things they want to share with the world, and in many cases fully-realised projects, assembled without any need to delve into the complexities of programming a computer from the ground up. Have you ever thought about making your own games? I bet you have, even if it was only briefly when you were twelve years old and didn’t know any better about how much work was involved in producing them. This article is one chapter of a multi-part Cover Game feature!
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |