Since lots of people come to this site looking for IG Maker related information and IG Maker tutorials, we decided to make a series of interactive IG Maker tutorials with step-by-step instructions. You can see the first one here: IG Maker Tutorial (this link will take you to a Flash portal). Read the rest of this entry »
Raising simulation games are pretty rare, even in Japan. Surprisingly enough, this one was made in Hong Kong!
Lair Land is a game with both raising sim and adventure / visual novel elements in a fantasy setting. The point-of-view character Herol is charged with taking care of Chilia, a mysterious girl who lost her memory. The raising sim part is quite similar to the Princess Maker series, with numerous stat-altering jobs, classes, vacations and even contests to participate in, things to buy and people to befriend. Read the rest of this entry »
Again (see IG Maker so far), not a review of IG Maker but rather a list of pros and cons of this game making software.
Since it was asked on a game making forum, it seemed best to put it here for anyone who is interested (and for those who have more questions, our IG Maker forum is a good place to ask).
From time to time comparisons will be made with other game making software. Most of what is said for The Games Factory 2 holds true for Multimedia Fusion 2 too – the former is a crippleware version of the latter. Read the rest of this entry »
To better understand how tiling works, let’s imagine we have a big game that takes place in an abstract environment that is composed primarily of green rectangles [see left].
A modern interpretation might be to draw all the rectangles manually and import the picture into the game as one big background. That would be pretty wasteful. In classic console RPGs, game environments were usually created with tilesets – collections of small pieces of the world that can be combined among themselves. Using tiles reduces file size and saves memory, so let’s see how is it done in IG Maker. Read the rest of this entry »
At Nekomura Games we like to play lots of different games, regardless of the genre, shinsaku (new releases) or current top sellers – if it’s a good game and there’s some time to play it, chances are it’ll be played eventually, even if it’s a game from 10 or 15 years ago. Of course there is some personal taste involved so some genres are completely absent in our games library, but still – the list of games that we played the most in 2009 is pretty diverse. Read the rest of this entry »
It’s time for the next update of Happy Memories: Azalea Town, devlog! I wanted to show some reference material we’re using to establish the atmosphere of this game. What would you expect to see in a raising simulation game set in modern Japan?
I would definitely expect a convenience store, game center, part time jobs where they tell you that egao (smiling face) is worker’s most important attribute, cute characters / mascots everywhere (hmmm… a relaxed bear would get us in legal trouble – perhaps a relaxed frog would do?) Read the rest of this entry »
For the last few days, I have been battling one of the central issues in any raising simulation game: The Calendar. The flow of in-game time has always been one of the most fascinating topics in game design for me. Unlike many other types of simulation games, raising sims tend to have a rather realistic flow of time with a fixed end. There are exceptions to this rule, such as Wonder Project J, but most raising sims present the player with a protege to raise from childhood to adulthood or at least from some less sophisticated state to a more mature one and end at an arbitrary point in time – when the protagonist reaches “maturity”. Read the rest of this entry »
Making games through a visual interface.
Disclaimer: this is not a review, but an attempt of documenting an artist’s (with some rudimentary programming knowledge) experience with IG Maker. In a nutshell: First impressions are very positive and IG Maker functions in a way that is very close to somebody who can think visually – but there are also a few niggles that somewhat downgrade the experience.
Enterbrain have a long history of making game makers across platforms from PC to Playstation: among others, engines for fighter / brawler games, dating sim makers and, probably their most popular product in the West, RPG Maker XP and RPG Maker VX. The main appeal of these makers is supposed to be their magic way of allowing basically everyone to make games, not just programmers. Judging by the amount of games made with Enterbrain’s engines, it certainly seems to work. The role of these makers can best be compared to digital cameras in the media of photography. Read the rest of this entry »
We'll be seeing more of Miles Edgeworth.
Capcom has made an Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth demo available to play online in English! In this demo, you get to examine Edgeworth’s office with the new point-and-click interface, and test the new “Logic” system, one of the series’ biggest new features. Obviously, the demo contains spoilers, but I played it anyway since the first case in each Ace Attorney game is usually more of a tutorial than a real full-blown “case”. It certainly looks promising!
You can play it online here:
It’s always interesting to see what can be done by different people using the same tools – holds true especially in the case of IG Maker because the software is still relatively new. Unfortunately, at the time of writing no finished games done in IG Maker were published outside of Japan yet.
Enterbrain, the company behind IG Maker, have been producing game engines – such hits as RPG Maker 2000 and RPG Maker XP (which were used in production of many commercially successful “indie” RPGs) – for a long time. And it shows – IG Maker is well organized and fascinatingly flexible!
To complement the tutorials for IG Maker that might be found elsewhere on Nekoworld (at the moment of writing: “How to put player character on screen” part 1 and part 2), we are making an experimental game that will follow soon after the series (or what could become the first part of a series) of tutorials is finished!
At the moment it looks like this (please ignore the main character, it’s just a placeholder):
Robot Farewell, an original IG Maker game by Nekomura Games
