RPG Maker
More info
- Owner
- Kadokawa
- Type
- Game engine and editor
- License
- Proprietary
- Website
- rpgmakerweb.com
A Japanese tool series for building 16-bit-style role-playing games without writing code — or with code, once you want to.
In Japan it's called RPG Tsukūru, and it came from ASCII Corporation, later Enterbrain and Kadokawa. The core idea hasn't moved since the 1990s: paint the world in a tilemap editor using stock tilesets and autotiling, drop in events, pick from a menu what they do. Turn-based combat comes free.
RPG Maker XP opened the engine up with RGSS, a scripting layer built on Ruby, and MV (2015) moved to JavaScript and HTML5. The tool has a reputation for producing hundreds of thousands of near-identical games with the same default sprites — and also Yume Nikki and To the Moon, which says more about what constraints can do than about the tool.