The Official RPG Maker forums shut down, (nearly) 20 years of assets & knowledge will be destroyed and we are looking to migrate

General
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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!

edit:

By request, here is the link to a parked domain. We are still currently building the website so (at least at the time of writing this edit) the link just goes to a “We’re working on it…” page with a link to the RMW Refugee Discord I set up.

https://rpg-refuge.com/

You are welcome to join the Discord though it is mostly made of RPG Maker users. You can find me on the server as “theAM-dol”, shoot me a DM if you want.

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Which forum are you referring to? There’s no link here.

Godot is perfect for creating “RPGs, visual novels, and/or quirky top-down horror/walking sims” and other games.

You could even create a fork — removing 3D from Godot and keeping only 2D — to build an engine similar to, or even better than, RPG Maker with low system requirements.

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Fond memories of RPG-MV (I’ve just bought it again, to try to revive some of my past creations..!). It was, at the time, an excellent initiation into (very modest, for me..!) RPG game creation; I even managed to ‘complete’ one or two..! I’ll be watching to see how this progresses, hoping that at least some of the Community can be revigorated. Good luck with it all; at my great age I can’t be of much practical help, but it would be good that it succeeds; meanwhile…

Have a wonderful day.

Edit : I have found a ‘teaser’ made for a game I made, ten years ago now (where does the time fly to..?), which I had managed to upload to a web server. It still operates..! Here’s the link, for the curious…

RPG Rachdale Cheese Teaser…

Pleased..? Yes indeed..! Go, RPG Maker..!

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Terrible news. Good luck to you with RWM community for the new website. Is it online yet?

Not a knowledgeable member but I would love to be there. My only Topic in this forum is an experimental project devlog. I’m also looking for other gamedev forum for multiposting the devlog. So, having a project/devlog/in development page would be great as I also love following small indie/pet/experimental projects thread.

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Give us a link, I’ll post some stuff.

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You’re developing a 3D game, but I assume we’re talking about 2D games here.

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Oh I just assume any gamedev related. Hey it just one extra axis, no one will notice :gdsweat:

I’ll just slip :detective: into one of these categories.

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Let’s wait for a response from TC, because if we’re talking about an “extra axis,” I have something to say about that.

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Hi everyone! Thank you so much for the friendly replies! I’m glad to see so much support.

I’ll answer questions 1-by-1

@tomcat A link was not posted because we are still building out the website. I did update the OP to include a url that goes to our parked domain. I’ll also post the link again at the bottom of this post.

I’m reaching out a little bit earlier than the launch of the website to give anyone interested some time to decide what they would want to contribute and compose it. We hope when the site launches we can have topics under every engine on pretty much day 1 (give or take).

@Dad3353 Thanks, Dad! Glad to have your support!

It’s actually quite amazing that a number of RPG Maker devs often step up from RPG Maker to Godot. I know of a few prominent figures in the RPG Maker community who are now making Godot projects (Drifty from Driftwood gaming being one of them)

I’ll check out that trailer first chance I get :laughing:

@hardboileduser The website itself isn’t publicly accessible, but we have a private build of it now and things are moving quickly. Maybe by next week or the following week we’ll be able to launch. I updated the OP to include a link to our parked domain. I’ll also post it at the bottom of this post.

We’d love to have you share your game and come be part of the community! At first you might be surrounded by a bunch of RPG Maker games, but hopefully with time we’ll have a diverse collection of projects across many engines going! And to answer your question about that elusive 3rd axis (I’ve heard legends about it…) Yes! It’s okay to have 3D games.

Some of the spiritual successor engines to RPG Maker, such as RPG Architect and RPG Paper Maker, both incorporate 3D cameras, though they do something like sprite based/voxel based 3D rendering akin to the “modern retro” style seen in games like Octopath Traveller. (And we plan to offer support for them on our website.)
(There’s also the MV3D/MZ3D plugins for RPG Maker)

@dragonforge-dev Thank you so much!

We currently don’t have a public website for you to access, but if you’d like to compose some stuff in something like a Google Doc I’ll make sure to ping you when the site is ready. That way it’s just a simple copy-paste job for you on launch day. You can also DM me on Discord or ping me on the RMW Refugee Discord. A link to it can be found on our parked domain.

Our parked domain can be found here:

https://rpg-refuge.com/

I also didn’t mention this, but don’t worry about archival! We’ve had some wonderful people both inside and outside of the community come in to aid archival.

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Thank you for your detailed response — a friendly, active discussion is the foundation of mutually beneficial cooperation!

I’m interested in the financial side of things. How are the games created by your community distributed? Are they only available for free, does everyone distribute them on their own, or do you help sell them in some way? Websites require investment — what funds support your website and forum? Free forums and websites look very lackluster — I searched for one for my project and couldn’t find anything suitable.

For my part, I can offer what I’m currently working on — a character generator for Godot. And we could try making a 3D visual novel as a demo scene to showcase the engine’s capabilities.

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I agree :blush:

Since we know that RPG Maker and web forums are a bit niche, we didn’t want to dive straight into expensive web hosting and S3 buckets.

The old RMW used a forum software called Xenforo, and so we decided to carry on using the same software since the RMW mods and admins are already familiar with it. In our opinion, we also feel it offers a better forum experience for large forums with many sections. (If you are curious, Godot forums use a forum software called Discourse.)

Xenforo offers a “Xenforo Cloud” license, which does come with some limitations, but overall for starting out, we believe it’s the most financially sound solution. IIrc, it’s about $60/month. Due to the reasonable cost, we were able to pay for the next few years out of our own pocket.

That said, we realize in order to sustain the website (and therefore maintain the knowledge and assets) for years to come, paying out of our own pocket isn’t always the most ideal. Or if we need to expand to self-hosting with an S3 bucket, the monthly cost is estimated to be $400/mo which is quite a bit more difficult to pay out of pocket.

So we have discussed methods of monetizing the forum in the future.

I, personally, had adamantly requested we do our best to avoid ads. Ads give a more reliable income over other methods such as premium memberships or donations, however they are obnoxious, could lead to security problems, and frankly…just make the website ugly.

Donations - so long as we are transparent with the community, I think community members will understand and be willing to offer funding. The problem here is that the amount and regularity is unpredictable. However, it is very fair and friendly to the users. Users who can’t donate don’t feel left out, while those who can are able to support us.

Premium memberships - This might provide more stable income, but may invite a “superiority” complex among some members. Additionally, our new website is also carrying on from RMW, so we don’t want to lock features users use to get for free behind a paywall - that would feel unfair. So this makes it a challenge for us to decide what kind of features we can offer to premium members.

We’ve also talked about taking 1 time fees for certain parts of the site, such as taking a “listing fee” for anyone who wants to post a commission shop thread, or maybe allowing members to post a banner of their game - kind of like community ran ads.

I think the best solution is going to be diversifying our sources of income, so we may likely land on some combination of all of the above (except hopefully not ads)

______________

We won’t be able to host games for download via our website - nor would we want to when there are already strong competitors out there.

For member’s games, they can just share links to download their games from Steam, Itch, Game Jolt, etc.

Hopefully that answers all the questions. If not, let me know!

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A huge thank you for your very detailed response and your captivating sincerity! :clinking_beer_mugs:

I ran into the same problems when looking for a hosting provider for my project. And I came to roughly the same conclusions — with a few minor differences.

My situation is different in that I can’t afford hosting. That is, I can only purchase it in one remote northern empire, which is very unreliable, but I have no way to get money from the outside world.

XenForo, for example, doesn’t work in our country.

Discourse is a terrible (to put it diplomatically) forum engine. That said, there are plenty of other issues here as well.

I fully share your approach to ads.

I’m very disappointed with donations. Apparently, the barrier to entry in gamedev is very low right now, and people want to make money for themselves rather than donate to others. And perhaps another reason is that people aren’t very interested in games right now, given the global turmoil. There’s no point in counting on donations too much.

I’d suggest giving more thought to the possibility of selling the game. A niche product might sell better through a niche platform. Itch.io is a good platform, but there are too many offerings there, making it difficult to find anything. Plus, their support is very poor. I don’t even want to talk about Steam—the commissions are outrageously high, and, most importantly, it’s completely unclear where the collected personal data ends up.

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You could try a hybrid system.
Accept ads and donations.
If the donations reach a certain level for the month then no ads for that month.

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Around 20 years ago, RPG Maker was the very first game engine I ever used, which allowed me to make a demo for a video game programme at university, which got me in, which subsequently landed me my first job in the industry. So RPG Maker is basically responsible for my video game career… I won’t hold that against it though :slight_smile:

I’m sure there are many others like me, and that the RPG Maker community will keep going. I can see why GGG would want to latch on to other engines (and, I suppose, their communities), but shutting down the forum seems needlessly aggressive… who knows, maybe the separation will turn out to be better for everyone, like from a bad relationship.

In any case, thank you for your efforts, and do keep us posted here.

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As IT Manager for a hi-tech aluminium foundry, I often had college youngsters coming for a few weeks ‘work experience’. If an interest was shown in learning some programming, I had RPG Maker on a spare PC for them to do exercises, such as ‘create a small Map and have a Player walk around it’. This kept them, not just amused, but also able to see how ‘logic’ processes needed thinking about.
One afternoon, the HR head came in, and started banging on about me ‘letting them play games’; I had to carefully explain that learning is not always writing out stuff in a schoolbook, and that this software was, indeed, very pedagogic. It’s a useful tool, I found, in those circumstances. Just sayin’.

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Good afternoon! Since you’ve brought up the topic of visual novels: I’m planning to publish some of my work-in-progress materials for my open project here in the near future: https://cthangover.github.io — maybe it’ll catch someone’s interest…

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Thank you everyone for your reply! Apologies for my slow response.

I’m really glad to see that so many people had experience using RPG Maker. It really is an effective entry point for game development, I believe. In all honesty, it was also my own entry point. I had tried engines like Unity and Unreal (I wasn’t aware of Godot at the time) but was unable to wrap my head around it. RPG Maker’s simple, yet powerful event command system acting like a “click-to-code” system was much easier for me to get to grips with.

I’ll continue to hang around the Godot forums at least until the website is up, but I have been interested in trying Godot, so who knows, maybe I’ll stick around longer.
I’ll be sure to let everyone know when the website it up. And of course, feel free to reach out if you have any questions.

There are a few points I wanted to bring up on the general forum philosophy.
RMW was the official forum, and naturally too, the engine appealed to a younger demographic. Therefore RMW had a pretty strict “PG-13” rule, so no adult content including sexually explicit content or gore.

We plan to carry these rules over to the new forum. We don’t want to restrict past members from suddenly being unable to access the forum. In addition, we don’t really want to be liable for children accessing content that they should not have access to.

Secondly is a contentious topic…

On RMW any time AI was brought up, it often lead into very heated and long debates, and even derailing threads. There was a period of time the Admin of RMW totally disallowed AI discussions and post for nearly a year. This rule was finally lifted, but in the interest of preventing discussions from getting out of hand like that again, there were strict rules about AI content. This included:

No AI generate code or support posts.
No AI generated assets of any kind; art, sprites, music, etc.
No AI generated content (as in, no AI memes or other non-game related stuff)
AI could only be used for translation of posts, since the forum was an English speaking forum but of course English is not everyone’s native language.

We intend to carry this rule over as well to our new website. I read a few posts here on the Godot Forums that seem to imply a similar thing happens here, so perhaps some members already know how difficult it is to navigate heated AI discussions, so I hope members will understand why we feel it’s important to reduce the amount of AI content that is hosted on our website (especially when we are paying for it as individuals and not backed by company money)

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This is a clear and, perhaps, reasonable restriction. I just want to point out that the NSFW community is generally more responsive, and it’s much easier to get feedback on your work there.

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Shocking!

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I know. A statement of all time :rofl: