The Rant Ame Has Gone On Like 80 Gazillion Times In Her Life (Patreon)

rule #1: do not let the resources available dictate the design of the game

rule #2: do not let the resources available dictate the design of the game

i have said this a lot, probably since i was like 12. i was so into RPG Maker back then, and i also loved playing other people's projects, however other people's projects were not always very good. one of the things that became a pet peeve of mine after playing several dozen not-very-good projects was the use of RTP graphics

ame, what's an RTP graphic??

well I'm glad you let me ask for you. RTP stands for Run Time Package which is a phrase that gets used in a lot of computer programs a lot and to be honest i'm not really sure what it entails for anyone else. but for RPG Maker, the RTP refers to a set of default/starting graphics and sounds that are included with the program and, in older versions, necessary for it to function even if they are not used.

unfortunately, because it is a default graphic set, that means everyone uses it.  even when i was 12 i found it increasingly difficult to take any game that used it seriously-- oh, it's a dramatic scene, oh, it's default hero Alex, again. his name is Leo this time. hi Alex. 

Aside from unduely shaping the creative direction of a project, it just shatters any immersion the game might have managed to build up.
(same with the default battle/meny systems but that's a story for a different time...)

so anyway I refuse to use RTP graphics.

at the same time this is kind of unfortunate because especially in in newer versions the default graphics are actually pretty decent quality. it is a trap; i know better. but that does open a different door. namely, i can just make graphics in the same admittedly smooth style as the RTP without actually using their designs. that'll work pretty well for almost everything-- 

except charsets, like the above.

Ever since RPG Maker VX they've adapted this really blocky visual style; I greatly dislike it. I think a lot of the reason it looks so blocky is because they switched to shorter character models. In RPG Maker 2k/2k3/XP (Reborn uses XP, most of my experience is in 2k3) the charsets were usually about x1.3 the height of a tile. They switched this to making them the same height. The characters became the blocks.

So although I wanted to reuse the RTP's style for charsets, I needed to solve that problem. The above is what we got, and is a result of me cutting apart one of the RTP character models to re-proportion it well, and then redoing the whole thing obviously). Usually when I've seen people do this in the past it hasn't worked out, but I'm really happy with how this turned. 

#worth