Thoughts about the RPG Maker and some unusual games

After my rant last night, I have a more relaxed and positive post here. It’s about the RPG Maker, a tool for making your own old-school, old-console RPGs. I’ve owned and used the RPG Maker (in various versions) for several years now, having fun with it and, most of the time, getting caught up in figuring out aspects of a new project instead of finishing it.

While you can really make a professional game with the tool (check Amaranth Games for a lot of those), it’s actually cheap enough for a non-professional to buy and easy enough for a non-professional to use. You paint your maps with tiles, add a few events with pre-defined commands (which are pretty straight-forward), and export the whole thing as an installation file you can share with whomever you want. You can add your own tiles (there’s free ones as well as sets to buy in the shop), your own music, your own characters (the ACE, the newest version, even has a character generator), and your own scripts to make the game do something different.

And this is where this post actually starts for me. You can’t just make RPGs with the RPG Maker (although you can surely make those and they can be a lot of fun), you can also make other games, if you can script. I can’t, but I can appreciate those who can.

Three of those other games will feature in this post, two I wrote about before and one I never mentioned so far.

The first one is “Madame Extravaganza’s Monster Emporium” by John Wizard Games. It’s a monster-gathering game of sorts. It has turn-based battles like a regular RPG Maker game, but you buy your monsters from Madame Extravaganza and earn money by going into randomly-generated dungeons and fighting your way through normal monsters and one boss per dungeon. After you won the boss fight, you get rewards (you can also find stuff in the dungeons). There’s different types with different monsters which unlock as you level up (so will your monsters). You can customize your monsters by choosing which attacks they will use and you can exchange members of your group whenever you’re in the town and not in a dungeon (if you have more than 3 monsters, of course). I admit I haven’t finished this game, because I just can’t get two of the orbs I need to unlock the last area and I just can’t get some of the special rooms in the dungeons I need to spot all monsters (you need to fight a monster and defeat it once before you can buy it). That’s the downside of Madame Extravaganza.

The second one is “Our Love Will Grow,” also by John Wizard Games. It’s a game like “Harvest Moon” or “Animal Crossing.” You have your own farm, you start growing crops, you get new seeds in a while, you also can pick stuff in the forest, keep animals (cows, sheep, chicken, bees, and a dog), mine for stones, iron, silver, gold, and gemstones, and find the love of our life. There’s regular parties in town where you can meet several different women whom you can woo. If you manage to get one of them to marry you, you can even have a child. This, of course, requires a top-kept farm and a big farmhouse instead of the small hovel you start with. I haven’t finished that one, either, but I did a lot of farming and I had a lot of fun with it so far. And one of those days, I will get all I need to propose to the girl of my character’s dreams and they will have a kid and live happily forever after on their farm.

The last game is “Fortune’s Tavern” by Michael Flynn (available on Steam). It’s not an RPG and it has some aspects from both games I already mentioned. Like “Madame Extravaganza,” it offers various pets for you to raise and keep. They accompany you into the forest behind the tavern, where you go working on quests (usually ‘find this’ or ‘find out about that’). Your main job, however, is to run and to renovate the tavern itself, so you get more guests and make more money and can do even more for the tavern. There’s three fractions you can cater to, there’s different additional buildings you can rebuild and put to use. On the whole, you can do a lot of stuff in the game and they just added a DLC where you can take over the job of Mayor for the nearby town of Fortune, as well.

All three games are a lot of fun and not the usual RPGs you might expect. And they show that with the ability to use the right scripting language, you can make a lot of different things with a relatively cheap and mundane tool.

Easier than getting a law passed

Okay, I had decided after my burnout that I didn’t want to get annoyed about things again that easily, but after quite some recent stuff about people denying services of various kinds to others based on their race/gender/sexual orientation, I have something to say about the topic myself.

If you have a problem with serving a person in your job because said person is, according to your eyes or to that personal belief system of yours, the wrong race/gender/sexual orientation or whatever, there is a much easier solution than passing laws: Don’t work in a service job. Yes, it is that easy.

If you take a job in service, no matter whether as a cashier, a pharmacist, a doctor (technically, doctors and nurses also work in service, since they provide health service), a pizza baker, or something else, you will have to be ready to serve everyone - as long as they are ready to uphold their part of the deal and hand you money for it. It doesn’t matter what your religious book or your preacher or your conscience has to say about it. If your conscience tells you to absolutely not do it again, then get another job, one where you don’t have to do that again.

And if you consider yourself a Christian, you might want to read all of your holy book one of these days, not just the part that justifies your prejudices. It’s going to take a while, especially if you read all of it, Old and New Testament. You might be shocked by the content especially of the New Testament. You see, this guy called Jesus whom you believe in, he had a strange way of seeing things. In essence, he only wanted people to do one thing: be nice to others. He sided with the poorest, with the outcasts of society. And he said there was only one rule to follow: love others like you love yourself (or, in some cases of extreme self-loathing, perhaps a little more than yourself).

The same, by the way, goes for the religious organisations operating public places over here in Germany, like kindergartens, schools, or hospitals. Stop looking down on people who you think have done the wrong thing. Stop choosing your employees merely by their religious belief and their marital status (nobody who got divorced and remarried is allowed to work in a Roman-Catholic kindergarten, school, or hospital). You want to serve society? You want to actually get people to listen to what you say? You want your slice of the cake? Then act like a responsible part of society and accept its reality. Divorce is reality, religious freedom is reality. Deal with it!

You don’t need to make laws to allow people to discriminate against others based on their personal belief. What you need, is to make laws to forbid people to discriminate against others for whatever reason (religious belief, race, gender, sexual orientation, whatever).

Digital Dress-Up Dolls

I admit I loved playing with paper dolls as a kid. I loved dressing them and making new dresses from paper (although my creations definitely left something to be desired). I’ve not thought about them for a long time, though, ever since my dolls went the way of everything made of paper and ripped. But today I stumbled over a nice website dedicated to all those little Flash games out there which are basically digital paper dolls. I spent a very funny afternoon making several different types of those dolls. Some of them I will show here, so it’s going to be a picture heavy post this time.

The Dandy Maker was my original link to the site, shared by a Steampunk group on Facebook. I only made two Dandies there so far and only took a snapshot of one, so here he is:

 Same time period (roughly), but opposite gender is the Victorian Butterfly. I made three of them, one very regular, one more Steampunk-ish, and one rather dressed for bed than for society.

The doll I made most use of so far was X-Girl, which allows you to create a female comic character. I made nine of them already and I’m not going to share them all here.

Another doll I had a lot of fun with was Princess of Doom. I made two princesses so far, unfortunately, you can’t put them more into the centre of the picture, perhaps I should cut them out and post them again.

There are lots of other dress-up dolls on that site, including most interesting time periods, a lot of TV-series, movies, books, and games, and a lot of fantasy stuff. Give it a go, if you enjoy playing around with such dolls.

Weekend Plans

I haven’t done any ‘what will I do this weekend’ posts for a long time now - I have pretty much neglected all my blogs for quite some time. I’ve stopped getting overly annoyed about things after my burn-out some years ago and I was getting tired of basically doing the same kind of post once a week, just to tell you what I was reading/watching/playing - especially as my plans and my reality often differ. However, I think I might take up my posts about plans for the weekend again.

So, what am I going to do this weekend?

I’ve several stories that need more writing, my old enemy, the ending, is at it again. It’s true, I find it easy to start a story, I get though the middle well enough, but I have a hard time with the end. Perhaps, subconsciously, I don’t want the story to end, as I like writing. Consciously, I often am not sure where to end, since I usually think further ahead than necessary, make up much more of my characters’ fate than I need. I should finish some smut stories I’ve been writing (first time I got past the beginning of vampire stories in a long time), most of them merely need a few more scenes. There’s a couple of Loki stories which only miss a chapter or two, same goes for the retelling of a fairy tale I did a while ago. I’ll be occupied for more than just a weekend with all of that, though.

I’ll probably be reading in “The Shadows of Sherlock Holmes,” an anthology edited by David Stuart Davies I bought ages ago. It includes a lot of detective stories written at the same time as Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories and overshadowed by them. I have been cross-reading it before, but now I want to read all of the stories.

I’ll definitely be watching the last episode of “Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” this weekend, as I just downloaded it from iTunes. In addition, I think of tackling either Season 4 of “Doctor Who” (new series), the one and only season of “Dracula,” and/or the second half of the second season of “Sleepy Hollow.” I’ve still got a lot of catching up to do.

I’ll also be playing some stuff, hopefully. I want to finish some TMs, namely “Sweet Kingdom,” “The Musketeers - Victoria’s Quest,” and “Fairy Kingdom.” I’ve also got quite some HOGs that need finishing, at least “Midnight Mysteries: Ghostwriting” and “”Revived Legends: Titan’s Revenge” deserve to be finished soon, since I got far with those already. I also want to go back to some adventures I was playing, like the remakes of “Gabriel Knight - Sins of the fathers” and “Grim Fandango.”

I’m sure I won’t get to finish all I planned. I’ll definitely watch “One of Us” tomorrow or during the weekend. I might start on “Sleepy Hollow,” since it’s only seven episodes and the other two series I want to watch are longer (10/14 episodes). I might get somewhere with my games, too. I should also play the second episode of “Tales from the Borderlands” this weekend, since it just came out and I have really been waiting for it. So much to do and little weekend.

Please don't tell my parents...

Some more book reviews from me. When I got the first two “Jeeves” story collections by P. G. Woodhouse and the complete “Anne of Green Gables” collection downloaded to my Kindle app on the PC yesterday, I was reminded I had, more or less on a whim, also bought two novels by Richard Roberts a little while ago. My guess is that they are geared towards teens, which would also fit with the age of the main characters, but they were so interesting and entertaining, I read them both yesterday, staying up longer than I had expected to.

“Please don’t tell my parents I’m a supervillain” is the first of the two novels centred around Penelope Akk, Claire Lutre, and Ray Viles, all 12 years old and middle school students. Penelope, Penny for friends and family, is the daughter of two superheroes herself and absolutely set on developing her own superpowers yesterday by preference. In the process of building a machine that could awaken her powers, she has her first invention ‘episode,’ coming up with a mechanic, voice-activated centipede that serves as both tool and recycler. While her parents expect her powers to develop slowly now, over the course of years, Penny is set to be a hero within a year. Unfortunately, things don’t go as planned. Not only does she awake her best friend Claire’s powers (Claire’s mother is a supervillain-turned-superhero) by accident (the serum was only supposed to make Claire more fit for being a cheerleader), she also gives her friend Ray superpowers with the same serum. Her first act as a superhero is to stop Ray from trashing the science fair after Penny was disqualified, since judges didn’t believe she had really built the Machine (the mechanic centipede), while the school bully Marcia will win with a project she probably did nothing for herself. Unfortunately, Marcia set the whole thing up in order to catch a villain and Penny and Claire have to help their friend get away, while Marcia aka Miss A tries to catch them. To make up for their first ‘supervillain’ appearance, they try to stop another young villain, who was stupid enough to announce his first coup online, only to be pushed back into the ‘villain’ mould by Marcia and two other heroes. Unfortunately, in the course of these endeavours, Penny and her friends also get their names as a team (The Inscrutable Machine) and as individuals - Bad Penny (not because Penny’s identity was revealed), E-Claire (an alias Claire used online already and that goes well with her ‘cute’ mind manipulation powers), and Reviled (which Penny creates on a moment’s notice, based on Ray’s full name). The only adults who learn about the identities of the three new supervillains in town are Claire’s mother (who doesn’t mind, as a former villain), the sometimes-villain/sometimes-hero LucyFar (a good friend of Claire’s mother), and Spider, the former arch-enemy of Penny’s parents. During the course of the first novel, however, Penny and her team manage to gain the respect of the supervillains of LA (where the story is set) and become recognized as villains themselves, with all the rules and protections that includes.

In “Please don’t tell my parents I blew up the moon,” school has started again and Penny’s parents still don’t know their own daughter, now 13, is the leader of the hottest team of young supervillains in the city, The Inscrutable Machine. Then she and her two friends get a message from Spider for a job that will take them to Jupiter. Penny is supposed to build a functional spaceship to investigate a strange message from a human-sounding young girl that originated somewhere in the vicinity of Jupiter. For this, she makes an organic spaceship and goes on a trip with Claire and Ray. They stumble upon proof the alien race known as “Conquerors” (whose technology Penny unknowingly copied for one invention in the first book) has fought a battle against other aliens out in the asteroid belt. They also find a remainder of those aliens, a biological tissue that controls and mutates beings and objects it comes into contact with, referred to as “Puppeteers.” They destroy a last hideout of the Puppeteers on their way to Jupiter, picking up a partially changed human from the turn of the twentieth century. Close to Jupiter, they meet several human colonists from the Jupiter moons Europe, Callisto, and Io who fled Earth during World War II. And there they are again, the supervillains who actually want to be heroes, caught between intrigues, old enemies, monsters, aliens, and a lot of Steampunk technology. It’s up to Penny and her team to solve it all, preferably before the Puppeteers are replaced by monsters even better at controlling humans. Sometimes, you just have to blow up a moon to save mankind when you’re a supervillain.

While both novels are nominally young adult fiction, they definitely are entertaining for older audiences as well. Luckily, the author has avoided the typical pitfalls of writing a story about a super-intelligent child (boy or girl alike), which include making them too adult and too obviously above every problem. Penny has the talent to make new stuff, but it’s only partially under her control. And apart from the ability to make a bike out of energy, a mechanical device that can ‘eat’ and ‘reproduce’ every kind of energy, object, or material, Penny is a normal 12-year-old. She has not-so-favourite classes like German (high intelligence doesn’t make a being good at everything), she gets bullied sometimes, she has more or less normal friends, she has a crush on the hero Mech, who is a friend of her parents. And even though she has grown up in a household with two super-intelligent parents, her life at home is refreshingly normal. Yes, when inspiration strikes, Penny can build super-batteries or reproduce alien technology her father can’t understand, but apart from that, she is a teenager with all that includes. There’s also pretty little cliché when it comes to other people in the books. The villains aren’t always aloof or fighting each other, they meet in Chinatown every weekend for parties. The superheroes aren’t always heroic (Marcia and Ifrit seem more like bullies who pretend to do it all for the greater good, Witch Hunter seems to be in the whole hero-business only to kill) and not everyone is always good or evil (LucyFar. who claims to be Lucifer incarnated, pretty much does as she pleases, in a D&D game, she would be true Chaotic Neutral). The pretty girl with the seductress for a mother (Claire, whose mother was once known as The Minx and a villain for most of her life among the supers) doesn’t get her mother’s ability to cloud minds with sexiness, for her it’s cuteness. And Claire is far more of a geek than Mad Scientist Penny, both Claire and Ray are far more into comics and superheroes than Penny is. And when the formerly-bullied boy with the terrible parents (Ray) gets strength, speed, and endurance (and a healthy ego boost), he doesn’t turn into the hero with the white hat, he actually enjoys wreaking havoc far more than Claire and Penny. Emotionally very understandable, but not how it normally goes.

The superhuman ability of Penny’s mother to analyze data fails when it comes to her own child, Barbara Akk, formerly known as The Audit, is always sure The Inscrutable Machine might be a danger to her daughter, but never makes the connection between the facts and the truth. It says a lot that the enemy of her parents makes the connection much sooner, but the Spider proves more or less honourable in her dealings - insofar as you can expect that from a villain (who also isn’t human). It might also say something that of all the superheroes the trio crosses paths with the only one realizing they are actually trying to do the right thing is the one hero everyone fears and nobody listens to - reanimated vampire/zombie Mourning Dove who is known to rather kill villains she stumbles across than take them to jail.

On the whole the two novel about Penny and her friends are a great read, not too challenging, but definitely not simple ‘kids’ novels, either. I really enjoyed reading them and will probably visit them again. I always like the ‘evil’ point of view and the kids aren’t really evil, they’re just a little … misunderstood.