Did You Ever Mess With "Game Development" Software as a Kid?

[Vardalis]

You know the kind. The stuff that was aimed at kids or teens who probably didn't know much better. The RPG Maker games on consoles. Heavily limited tools on PC like FPS Creator or 3D Gamemaker. Did you get anywhere with it? Make anything that surprised you, your friends or your family? Got any memories of stuff like that?

I spent a decent amount of time messing around with 3D Gamemaker Lite myself. I found it cheap in a store and since I loved video games and wondered how they were made I foolishly got it thinking it'd be something amazing or a great learning experience or whatever. It was fine for what little it was; effectively a system for swapping out what enemy, pickup, weapon and such you had in a (I believe) pre-generated map with whatever theme you selected and spitting it out as a "game". My fondest memory was making a series of "Mr Poop" "games" for my little cousin to laugh his way through with the cheesiest story texts a ten or eleven year old could muster.

 

[Segadude113]

RPG Maker on the PS-One. :)

 

[qw90700]

My first time was this but I was a young man back then: https://retrogametalk.com/repository/psx-iso/kakuge-yaro-fighting-game-creator-japan/

You can select fighters, their stages, detailed modification for their stages like what they will say before fight, details in stage and music, you can select what button beforms what fighting moves and all but it was kinda dissappointing that it had no way to edit sprites of the characters but it had detailed color changing options for these sprites. Yet overal due to custom way of selecting moves and thus combos and these moves are actually fun for many characters it's kinda my favorite fighting game.

I wish I had a way to develop games like these modern Unreal and Unity engine when I was a kid for I know I would spend my time on developing games more than playing them back then lol.

 

[χKai]

I had the RPG Maker on PS1.
I made a few 'games' on them, but the premise was mostly designed to try to stray from the RPG elements as much as possible, instead offering multiple, linear paths with predetermined, unavoidable battles on the way, with enemies you can see on-screen instead of random battles. While I did make many projects, none of them were that good, the only one with much potential was my idea to create a story based on the story of the true 'main RPG characters' from Gobli; not Gobli himself or Mark or Neko, but the actual RPG party, the Knight and Wizard and all them. With all the content and examples shown in the game through events in Gobli, and images from the instruction manual, I wanted to create an entire story around who was supposed to be the 'main' party in the Gobli sidestory, and go from their perspective instead of Gobli, opting to create a more traditional RPG experience. Alas, I never found the time or motivation to finish the project.

 

[Segadude113]

I had the RPG Maker on PS1.
I made a few 'games' on them, but the premise was mostly designed to try to stray from the RPG elements as much as possible, instead offering multiple, linear paths with predetermined, unavoidable battles on the way, with enemies you can see on-screen instead of random battles. While I did make many projects, none of them were that good, the only one with much potential was my idea to create a story based on the story of the true 'main RPG characters' from Gobli; not Gobli himself or Mark or Neko, but the actual RPG party, the Knight and Wizard and all them. With all the content and examples shown in the game through events in Gobli, and images from the instruction manual, I wanted to create an entire story around who was supposed to be the 'main' party in the Gobli sidestory, and go from their perspective instead of Gobli, opting to create a more traditional RPG experience. Alas, I never found the time or motivation to finish the project.

it's fun making maps.

 

[Sunnyside]

I started plenty of RPG Maker projects. I'd come up with a random concept and figure out all the underlying systems. However I didn't possess the discipline to expand on any of those ideas. In the end it was just a bunch of maps and dialogue with nothing to really do on them.