Hi Godot devs,
Thanks for the friendly and active forum.
I realize the scope of “RPG Maker” is way outside the purview of many devs here so it is unlikely the news may have not reached you.
The News…
The official RPG Maker forums, hosted by Komodo (the ex-publisher of RPG Maker) have been requested for shut down and deletion by Gotcha Gotcha Games (GGG - the developer of RPG Maker).
RPG Maker Web forums (RMW) has been around for 14 years, though the admins who ran the forums carried over from a fan forum before even that, likely making it have content 2 decades old. Sign ups have been stopped, the forum has gone read only, and in December the server will get nuked - taking with it years of knowledge, assets, and code lovingly generated and offered for free by the community.
Ferrying the community to a new home…
During the 1 and only week GGG gave us before the forum went read only, I managed to hastily set up a Discord group for the RMW community and coordinate archival and migration efforts.
It’s been a crazy 2 weeks! In the span of 1 week we had over 700 members sign up to the Discord! I’m sure those number pale in comparison to other discords (likely including the Godot discord) but it’s still a large number of people who cared deeply about this quirky little game engine.
While there are other communities that we could scatter towards, such as the RPG Maker Reddit, or the long standing fan forum RM Network, after polling the community it seems that RMW had something special that those communities don’t offer and so we are looking to create a new home from scratch.
The harsh reality…
The last standalone, mainline entry to RPG Maker was RPG Maker MZ which launched in 2020. Since then, GGG broke ties with it’s publisher and went solo. The business decisions since then have been questionable (the forum closure being one of the worst). All RPG Maker releases since then have been basically plugins for other engines, such as RPG Maker Unite for Unity and recently Action Game Maker, a Godot framework. Neither of these releases were well received. Rather than listen to the community, they are doubling down, recently announcing RPG Maker U2U which is a semi-3D RPG Framework for Unity.
We would be fools to think that the future for the engine is bright. In fact, a general sentiment has been that the community has been on a slow but painful decline.
It would be a fools errand to make a new community focused forum just for a dying community…
That’s why I am here!
We want our new forum to extend to other engines, offering support, discussions, asset & code hosting for more than just RPG Maker.
Building the brighter future…
We want our new forum to extend to other game engines, but more specifically, we want to focus on RPGs, Visual Novels, and/or the quirky top-down horror/walking sims that RPG Maker was known for.
We are reaching out to various engine community and developers to request their support.
We’d be thankful for any support we can get in helping us get this website off the ground.
I’m reaching out to the Godot community hoping that knowledgeable members might be willing to offer some “first posts” for the Godot Engine section of the website. This can really be anything you think is worth sharing, but could be things like “Making your first turn-based RPG in Godot”, “Easy and free frameworks for RPGs”, or simply “getting started with Godot”. The more topics (and richer the information) is, the better!
One pervasive question might be, “But why? The official Godot forum exists.” or “There’s plenty of tutorials for that on Youtube.”
True!
However, the purpose is more to encourage usage of the forum. Nothing says “You’ll never get help with that question here” than a barren wasteland forum with 0 topics.
We aren’t looking to override community support platforms, but rather build bridges, so it’s completely okay to link out to other support platforms such as this forum!
We’d appreciate any support you might be able to offer. If you are interested let’s keep in touch. I can send you either my Discord contact for direct DMs, a link to the RMW Refugee discord I set up, or we can chat here.
I’ll hang around the Godot forums for a bit!
(I’ll offer some support where I can. I don’t know Godot, but I do know music pretty well or general game design philosophies that are engine agnostic.)
Once again, thank you so much, and thank you for taking the time to read this.
Best of luck on your game dev adventures!