I’ve been making video games for more than three years now, thanks to the wonderful and easy to use software RPG Maker. I’d been vaguely aware of that software for about two decades previous, but 2022 was the year I finally bought it and started learning how to use it. I want to talk a bit about what RPG Maker is, what kind of video games can be made with the scripting environment it provides, and finally, the games I’ve made.
For those who are unfamiliar with the term JRPG, that stands for Japanese Role Playing Game. It’s a particular genre and style of video game that usually features turn-based battle systems, anime and “super deformed” art styles, armor and weapon systems, and often magic or special abilities. Most JRPGs have the player roam somewhat freely in an overworld, with the ability to go into towns, talk to NPCs, and recruit party members. JRPGs are known for their stories which often center on a young or inexperienced person gaining strength and abilities over the course of the game in order to defeat or overcome a great danger or challenge.
I’ve been inspired to make games in this style because of the many wonderful and fun games like this I’ve played over the years. I look up to many of the luminaries of the Japanese video game development world, in particular, famed game director Yuranubi Sosumi, who had this cogent piece of advice to give:
I’ve also heard the term “16-bit Adventure” applied to this style of game, because they were popularized during the 16-bit console era of the 1990s. Many JRPGs have a pixel-art look to them, and the ones made by RPG Maker are no exception.
I happen to really like these kind of games, so I’m quite fond of the games I’ve been able to make in RPG Maker. Since starting back in 2022, I’ve made six games in total, which vary considerably in tone and in gameplay style. These six first games of mine range from a very traditional JRPG style adventure game, to a very linear visual novel style experience, and multiple points in between.
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Here now is a chronological breakdown of each of those six games, along with my reasoning for making it and my thoughts about how it turned out. This entire section will contain spoilers, so if you don’t want these games to be spoiled for you, play them before reading further.
This was my very first game, and the story and overall design were inspired purely by my learning about how to use RPG Maker MZ, and fitting a story about female androids around what I understood to be the RPG Maker visual scripting editor’s strengths and simplest features to implement.
I came up with a plot which featured three android factions – two main and one ancillary. These factions were hostile to one another, and the player character found himself suddenly inserted in the midst of a war between the two main factions, trying to find answers and possibly resolve the conflict.
Since it was my first time making a game, I focused on a limited set of features of the RPG Maker editor. So there are no extensive skill, armor, or weapons systems, and not even the ability to level up. There are only two enemy types, and two party members that the player can (and needs to) take with them. It is a very short game, though, which can be completed in about an hour.
I used a system of exploring “data terminals” to find out information, both in a literal sense for the player and in a game system sense to add to variables that allow progress to a certain point. There are also “cryptographic keys” that need to be obtained to enter into an underground area, where the player must venture alone.
This underground area requires the possession of two specific items, which are available to be purchased from each of the android factions. It’s not explicitly stated that these are needed for success, because I intended there to be a puzzle-like element that the player needs to solve.
Lastly, there is a set of choices that will be encountered underground by the player. If the player has read and understood the short and cryptic notes from the data terminals, then they should be able to make a choice which results in the good ending. But if the player hasn’t paid attention, then one of the very bad endings occurs.
I learned a lot while making this game, and I also inserted a secret “learnable” skill that the player can gain by repeating a certain action a certain number of times. This is something I adore about games – when there are hidden features that the player can discover that aren’t explicitly explained by some tutorial or expository dialogue somewhere. My next games would be full of such little discoverable secrets.
I’ve gone back and replayed this game just for fun recently – it’s really hard to enjoy a game for what it is while I’m making it, because all my mind can focus on are the typos, problems, or flaws that might still be present. It’s honestly not mind-blowing or anything. It’s a good, fun little game if you like JRPGs and female androids. There is so much I would add, expand, or embellish if I were to make this game now. But I’ve moved on to newer, bigger, better games.
Pomplain Forst in Outer Spave (2022)
While I was creating and working on my first game, I noticed how much skill and artistry went into the default map tilesets, the default clothing, and the default music that comes packaged with RPG Maker MZ. So I decided to make a more traditional style JRPG with mostly default assets, themed around a fictional and ridiculous Viking hero that my friend Keizo and I made up from a typo I made.
In hindsight, using default art and assets for most things wasn’t a good choice, because I later learned that most people who make RPG Maker games don’t bother to change anything – not the font, not the music, not the sound effects, not the tilesets. As a result, most RPG Maker games that you can download have a very similar look and feel. Unfortunately, this would be counted among one of them, but I still say that I made a very good game with this one.
I started with the premise of a very large overworld map that could be explored by the player, with towns, people, villains, and monsters to fight as they were encountered. I was directly inspired by an 8-bit RPG for the Commodore 64 called Questron, which itself was a blatant clone of the early Ultima games. I’ve never fully played through any of the Ultima games, but I played the hell out of Questron. I always enjoyed the sense of exploration, the sense of adventure, and the sense of gaining strength and capabilities that its RPG system offered the player.
So as a result, Pomplain Forst in Outer Spave has a battle system with lots of monsters, some magic skills to learn and use, some armor and weapon upgrades to grind for, and a map that needs to be progressively unlocked by the purchase of different boats. It has a serviceable and pretty standard story, which serves as the backdrop to the ridiculous and funny characters and writing I put into it. There is only one party member for Pomplain Forst to recruit – his old friend Scurvy Kveldulf. That is completely missable to, which would result in a very, very hard game.
My repertoire of skills with RPG Maker had expanded greatly when I made this one, and I think it is still the most fun of all my games to just play for the sake of gameplay. I really like to battle and grind in JRPGs, and this game is pretty much all about that.
I did start to discover some of the flaws and limitations with the RPG Maker MZ editor while I was making this one, however. The big flaw I’m talking about here has to do with “battlebacks”, which are the images that appear on the battle screen as a backdrop to the action while your character fights enemies. Since there is only one overworld map, I couldn’t specify battlebacks the usual way – which is per map. I had to instead rely on the battle system changing battlebacks depending on which enemies were currently faced by the player.
There is an unbeatable flaw with the way that RPG Maker MZ handles this, though. Take this example. The player fights a polar bear, so the battleback shows a tundra field with snowy mountains. That matches. Next, the player gets on his boat and sails far out to meet a sea snake. The battle back is supposed to change to open sea and sky, yet the battle back still shows tundra and mountains. The very next battle with another sea snake will display the right battleback, though, but if the player goes to shore again and fights another polar bear, the battleback will stay the same sea and sky battleback for the very next fight.
This issue had me pulling out my hair for literally days. I probably spent 20 hours trying different things, looking up old forum posts and searching for information about it. I eventually learned that it just doesn’t work the way I want it to, and the late-changing way it is in the game is the way it’s meant to work.
But that’s really the only thing I’m disappointed about with the game I made. I came back to it in late 2024 and added a fishing mini-game and some more quests and stuff to do around the map, so it’s even better than it was when I released it back in 2022.
Oh, and those who play this after playing the first game I made might wonder where the expressive portraits went. In the first game, I used the character generator feature to make character portraits that were smiling, serious, angry, surprised, and all kinds of other expressions. They would look appropriately according to the dialogue being spoken in the game. But for this game, I found it really, really funny to just have the characters have the same look all the time. Pomplain Forst has this stupid, overly serious scowl on his face through the entire game, and I love it. You may consider that a downgrade in detail, but it was actually on purpose.
I took more than a year off from making games because I had actually been discouraged by a third and aborted attempt of mine at making a game. This unreleased third game was going to be a game based on my audio play “A Spy Affair”, which you can read the script for here. When I started making the A Spy Affair game, I tried for weeks to think of gameplay elements that I could add to this already existing story. I really couldn’t think of anything, so after a long while, I just started scripting out the story scene by scene in the editor.
I thought that as I went, I’d have spontaneous ideas for gameplay that I could include alongside the story, but that just didn’t happen. I got about a third of the way, realized I was making a linear visual novel, and dropped the project. I also realized that this story of mine works way, way better as an audio play than as any other medium. So that was dozens of hours down the drain.
But not quite, because I soon decided to make a JRPG version of the first Fembot episodes from the Bionic Woman. I approached this one differently, taking great liberties with the story in order to not just provide different endings, but to introduce other characters and settings in different ways that weren’t in the original show. I’m sure purists and fans of the original series wouldn’t approve of me putting Chester Dolenz in charge of female androids he calls Maskatron Robots, and they definitely wouldn’t approve of the player as Steve Austin having the ability to side with either Chester Dolenz or Dr. Franklin, in addition to the OSI.
Another decisive break I made with the previous way of making games was to start using photos as character portraits, rather than using the in-editor character generator. This was spurred by my attempts to make Steve Austin, who ended up looking like a confused anime kid, and Oscar Goldman, who looked like an angry Chinese man. I cropped and edited screenshots of them from the TV series, and I haven’t looked back since.
The time I spent making the abandoned game had actually gotten me more familiar and proficient with the RPG Maker editor, and one of the maps I spent about 9 hours constructing was able to be imported in full to be used as a location in The Fembot Crisis. So that worked out quite well for me.
I also found myself working with a great set of characters and a great story too, thanks to what the original episodes from the 1976 TV series had. I took a deep dive learning about the characters and the setting, especially the relationship between Steve Austin and Jaime Sommers, who are both in the game. I tried to fit my new additions and changes as best as I could with my understanding of the lore of that show and its characters, and I think I did a really good job. I think I nailed Dr. Franklin’s smug arrogance too.
As an experiment to produce a game with multiple different endings, which is one of the features that the “A Spy Affair” game would have had, I think this one turned out the best out of all the similar games I’ve made like that. My favourite ending is by far the “good” ending when the player sides with Chester Dolenz, but they’re all quite fun to experience. And again, those extra endings are pretty much hidden. There are points in the game when the player will have a choice of how to respond. Naturally, as Steve Austin, the player would be led to act as the OSI hero, and to lock up Dolenz and eventually bring down Franklin. But there are options not to.
If you’ve played this and missed the two other endings, you should give it a try. You might have more fun being the bad guy.
By this time, I was back into the full swing of making games as a hobby. I really enjoyed it, and I had advanced from a beginner with the RPG Maker editor to an intermediate user. I decided that my next game would be a porn game about screwing androids.
That’s all I really intended. There was to be a post-apocalyptic setting, some robot enemies to fight, some leveling up and advancing to do, and some gear to get. And robot sex – lots and lots of explicit robot sex.
As I was making this game, I was sharing ideas about it, images, and even builds with my friend Kishin. And to my eternal gratitude, he suggested putting some kind of actual story into this game. I thought about that for a while, and eventually came up with a pretty good story that fits the world, characters, and gameplay I came up with. I’m glad he suggested that, because it’s a far better game with a story than it would have been without.
This was the game where I really started expanding my use of interesting and novel visual scripting methods. It might not look like it from just playing the game, but there is a lot of complicated stuff going on underneath while the player is playing. That serves to give things a more reactive and more immersive feel while things are being experienced. My time making the previous games had served me well.
I should also mention that this game has one of my favourite little missable secrets… a specific character that makes me laugh every time I think about her. If you’ve played this game, you know who I’m talking about.
I had been thinking of original stories to make for my next game after Mechatropolis, but I decided instead to try to adapt not just the failed Futureworld movie, but the failed Beyond Westworld TV series from 1980. Why would I do such a thing? Well, play the game I made, and you’ll see that I was actually able to combine characters and story elements from both to make something quite good. It’s all just a chance to interact with female android characters, anyway.
For this project, I had to do a lot of thinking. I mean, have you seen Futureworld? Have you watched the six episodes of Beyond Westworld? That’s some awful, awful stuff. While it may be true that both that movie and that series had some truly great and memorable female android special effects for the time, the story, acting, and direction were just horrible.
So I had to figure out what to salvage, what to exclude, and what to change. This necessitated a proper, full watching of the entire Beyond Westworld TV series, which I had actually never done before. Oh my god.
If you’ve never watched Beyond Westworld in its entirety before, and are only interested in the sexy female robot stuff, then please, spare yourself the trouble. It’s bad. It’s possibly the worst thing I’ve ever watched. The story, plot, settings, and motivations of characters are a jumbled mess.
First off, I have to talk about the central character John Moore. He’s supposed to be the Chief of Security at Delos, yet the first we see of him, he’s arriving at Westworld after the fact, doesn’t have a clue what’s going on, and has to be brought up to speed on everything. This is nonsense. I sat around for weeks wondering if I even could make a story work that combines this film and series, or if it was a lost cause due to the character John Moore.
Then I hit on this idea: John Moore was intentionally sidelined and out of town because of the evil bad Delos robots who wanted him out of the picture, and his character in my game wonders why and complains about it too. After I had this idea, the whole rest of the story just kind of fell into place. So John Moore arrives, there are robot spies, there is Simon Quaid having stolen 200 robots, there is love, there is betrayal, and it all comes together in a good ending or a bad ending, and two variations of each.
I’m still quite amazed that I was able to make the story I did out of the source material, and it’s quite a good experience if you’re into the female androids of Delos. This is by far the most linear of all the games I’ve made in RPG Maker, and I don’t really consider it a game so much as a visual novel. I never even used the battle system once in this game, for example. All the player does is walk around as John Moore and talk to people in order to try to do his job, get information, and unravel the mysteries of what’s going on at Delos.
Oh and I changed the executive robot boss of Delos named Duffy to a woman. She’s Sofia Loren now. If I ever get a time machine, I’m changing that in the movie Futureworld too.
The Second Fembot Crisis (2024)
I had always guessed that I would try my hand at adapting the “Fembots in Las Vegas” episodes of the Bionic Woman, since I had had such success with the “Kill Oscar” trilogy.
This one is definitely more of a game than the last one was, but it’s still fairly linear. To compensate for that, it’s actually two games in one, because from the start the player can choose to play as either Jaime Sommers for the OSI, or Carl Franklin for the Fembots.
I really like this idea I came up with, and I’ll say right off the bat that to me at least, the Carl Franklin side of the game is way more fun. But in order to accomplish this, I had to dissect and analyze the story of “Fembots in Las Vegas”, and figure out how to tell it from two very different perspectives.
And I realized as I was doing this that as sexy as those Fembots are, the 2nd series of episodes just isn’t as good as the first. “Fembots in Las Vegas” has an inferior script, direction, and acting compared to “Kill Oscar”. The filming of the episodes were rushed at the end too, I presume, because the end seems to be a lazy and hurried take of things just to get them done.
But the story and characters are what they are, and if I was going to adapt it as a JRPG, then I had my work cut out. I made some changes, most notably I made manifest the running joke between me and my friends that Rudy Wells kept the Lynda Wilson Fembot because she isn’t in the 2nd Fembot episodes. The actual reason is because the show switched networks and the actress wasn’t available. But in my game, yes, Rudy Wells took Lynda Fembot home and made her his robot waifu.
More changes I made were to add the character Alex 7000, which was a Hal 9000 type supercomputer from a different Bionic Woman Episode. Without spoiling too much, Alex 7000 can play a pivotal role in the game in both sides of it. I also included Max the Bionic Dog as Jaime Sommers’ companion, simply because I love doggos. Purists will point out that Max didn’t appear in the show until a year after these episodes, but that’s okay. Rudy didn’t really take Lynda home with him either.
I also came up with that fishing mini-game I mentioned earlier for this game, which is a fun little diversion at the very beginning and the very end of the game if you play as Jaime Sommers. Stuff like that isn’t related to the plot, but it’s nice to give the player options for things to do in a game like this.
Up to the point of making this game, it had contained by far the most complex and deep scripting in its events that I had ever employed. My familiarity and control of the RPG Maker editor was getting better and better, and I was able to script out scenes and interactions between “npcs” that I thought had been impossible before. It’s a very detailed and rich experience, and again, most of the complexity is hidden behind the scenes. It only serves to make things more reactive and immersive as the player experiences the game.
There are parts where the story drags, but honestly, that couldn’t be helped. Watch the original shows, especially part 2. It drags like you wouldn’t believe through half of that episode. I had to abbreviate and shorten a lot of the action just to make it less tedious, and the Jaime Sommers side of the game still suffers a bit from that.
But I did my best, and I think I made a really great game.
And that’s an in-depth look at my first six games. I titled this post “The Greatest Games That Nobody’s Ever Played” because, let’s face it, who even looks at this website? For as much effort and skill that I’ve put into these games, I think the number of people who’ve actually played them can be counted on one hand. I sadly suspect that I’m the only person who’s ever played the Pomplain Forst game. That’s fine with me, since I made these for myself, and I enjoy them immensely. But if you’ve played these, and if you know someone who would enjoy them, let them know about them. They’re all free to download and to keep.
Even if you’re someone who doesn’t play games and is into female androids, I say you should give these a try. All you need is a decent PC with Windows 7 or above, or a way of playing Windows games like Proton or possibly Winlator. Give them a try. What do you have to lose?