Let's find out how we started creating games.

Did you read about my background yet?

No? Great, so this will all be new to you 😜
_{(In the unlikely case of yes: you won‘t regret it, there will be a lot of new stuff)}

TL;DR
RPG Maker was my first love. It got me started with creating games. Making games with friends is invaluable ❤️

First Love is the deepest
.. is what they say. I kind of agree, but let’s take a look at the history.

The year was 2000 when I got my first computer — and it sucked. It was slow, the monitor was a 13 inch screen and I never got the games I actually wanted.

At this point, I was far away from being a gamer. I was playing all the small games that came with some computer games magazines and even these were sometimes too much for my computer.

At some point I realized that they are not that complex and big.

I was looking for tools to make my own games and found.. RPG Maker 2000 🤓

I downloaded the latest version and jumped right in.

If you don’t know the RPG Maker and you have no idea about coding I highly recommend it to get started.

Basically it’s a graphical editor to build your own world (with pre-made sprites, graphics and animations) with a few clicks and throw some logic and events via semi-visual scripting into it.

And that’s it, you got your first game! You won’t get awesome graphics, implement complex logic or get a nice 3D environment but you will get an understanding of how to structure a game and get your first results in just a few minutes.

Just Nonsense
We were never serious about anything back then and only had stupid ideas. That’s why we only created crappy games that were not at all publishable 💩

But we were happy. Imagine a bunch of guys in their teenage years laughing their asses off about all their dumb ideas and having nothing but fun 🤪

Sometimes I copied real games like Medal of Honor and made them in RM2k which was fun but senseless because you could never realize such a game with an engine like this. However it was fun seeing people making their favorite games with this engine.

Others were doing full stories (and only stories) with the tool to create kind of like a TV Series.

One of the greater games that was done with the RPG Maker was To the Moon or Vampires Dawn 1&2.

But in the end I never pushed through to actually complete a game because my mind was racing and I wanted to do so much stuff.

_{18 years later I found an article that really helped me focus.}

At some point we switched to the brand new RPG Maker 2k3, which had big improvements (including sideview battles like in Final Fantasy 1–6) but still didn’t help us finish serious games and send them out into the world.

Eventually RPG Maker XP saw the light of day which made things even worse for us. It was way less fun to create stuff with this engine once we were used to the “great graphics” of RM2k and RM2k3.

So we slowly faded out from creating games and eventually stopped.. _{(Not really though.. 😜)}