RPG Maker and Spriter both massively discounted today on Steam

 

So today I fired up Steam to finally pull the trigger on Pillars of Eternity and what do I see….

 

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It seems that Degica games, the makers of the popular RPG Maker series of game building tools are having a sale today.  Their flagship product RPG Maker VX Ace ( … quite the name ) is currently on sale for 80% off.

 

On top of RPG Maker Vx Ace, RPG Maker XP and RPG Maker 2003 are all also discounted, 80% and 50% respectively.  What perhaps caught my eye most of all however wasn’t the RPG Maker line of products, but Spriter is also on sale for 75% off.   Spriter was a successfully kickstarted project made by BrashMonkey, I had no idea Degica was now the publisher.

 

About Each Program

 


RPG Maker

 

 

This is a program that has been around for a very long time, first released in 1988.  As the title suggests, it’s a game building tool for making RPG’s, generally of the classic jRPG format.

 

That said, this is a proper game building application, a number of commercially shipped games were created using the various iterations of RPG Maker.  RPG Maker was mentioned as an option in my guide to getting kids started in game development.  Bundled with a ton of premade assets, it is a good way to get your hands wet in game development.  In addition to world, character, dialog, etc… building tools, there is also a programmatic layer using the Ruby programming language. 

 


Spriter

 

Perhaps of most interest to GameFromScratch readers is Spriter.  Spriter is essentially a modular 2D animation system.  You basically cut your sprites up into multiple independent pieces which in turn can be animated.  You can also apply an IK chain ( inverse kinematics… think skeleton ) that controls the animation for you.  You can then export the resulting animation as a sprite sheet, sequence of images or as an animated gif.

 

Most likely though you will want to use the Spriter API, or one of the pre-existing plugins, and use the Spriter animations directly in your game engine, such as Construct, Unity or LibGDX.

 

Truth is, I did a pretty lousy job there describing Spriter, so I will just show their video instead…

 

 

Both are on sale until May the 29th. 

 

Oh, and as I finish typing this up, the Steam page for the sale now appears to be broken…

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