RPG Maker once spawned countless roleplaying games of all shapes and sizes with tools that let anyone, regardless of their programming experience, make their own adventures. RPG Maker makers Gotcha Gotcha Games are now working on a very similar Action Game Maker.
Action Game Maker shares plenty with its various older 'Maker' siblings, giving people easyish tools to make an action game without much (or any) coding knowhow. The tools use a "node-based visual scripting system" that you can catch a brief glimpse of in the trailer below - it basically lets you drag and connect verbs, kind of like Project Spark, for the five other people who played that back in the day.
"Take advantage of the excellent 2D functionality provided by Godot Engine, the popular open source engine powering Action Game Maker," the project's Steam blurb reads. Other features include design based on the existing Godot UI, support for GDScript, "a complete 2D pipeline," a tile map editor, support for both sprites and bone animations, and "access to Godot's rich particle and shader systems."
Hundreds of distinct and wildly varied games came out of RPG Maker with the psychological dreamscapes of Omori, the memory-hopping tale of To The Moon, fangame Pokemon Uranium and the influential post-apocalypse Lisa: The Painful all being built with the tools. Who knows? Maybe we'll see a crop of similarly weird, subversive action games drop in the next few years since I assume Action Game Maker will be just as robust as its predecessor. Metroidvanias, roguelikes, action-RPGs should all be possible, so next time you have a mind-blowing video game idea that you can't believe hasn't been made yet, here's your chance!
I'll probably cook up a bad Frankenstein adaptation that sees the monster enact his brutal revenge on snobby university lads when Action Game Maker comes out sometime in 2025.
In the meantime, check out the best RPGs you should play right now.
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