The RPG Maker line of game-making-software has been a hit in the indie developer community. This line of engines, made by Enterbrain, is mainly geared toward making RPGs, though plenty of people have used it for adventure games and visual novel-type stuff. However, what if you want to make something more? Enterbrain’s publishing company, Kadokawa, has come out with Pixel Game Maker MV, a sister game-making-engine geared toward making 2D action games. So, how approachable is Pixel Game Maker MV?

Pixel Game Maker MV is one of those engines that advertises the ability to make games without needing to know how to code. You know, something for beginners. You can either make a game with a side-scrolling view or a top-down perspective. The former opens the way for making platformers, though that’s probably not the only kinda game you can make with that perspective.

Pixel Game Maker MV tries to set users in the right direction with a tutorial; not a help guide, though there is one of those. The engine gives an interactive tutorial on how to create a basic system: moving around, fighting enemies, game over screens, etc. On one hand, this seems helpful and really sets it apart from other engines that’ll just throw you in there.

On the other hand, the tutorial is just poorly implemented. For one thing, the interactive tutorial stuff sometimes floats over to the wrong places and at times obscures what you actually need to click. Sure, whatever. Then there was the problem that while the tutorial typically lets you advance on your own, there are times where it can only automatically advance when you do something specific. The issue with that is that it just doesn’t work. At times, doing the wrong thing was actually what triggered the tutorial to continue. Eventually, it got to the point that the tutorial refused to continue regardless of what I picked. Which of course you know, it’s pretty bad if the tutorial doesn’t work.

So, I said whatever and skipped that part of the tutorial. That’s when I ran into another problem. While starting at a later point gives you all the resources and set-up that you would have had if you continued the tutorial normally, the translators assumed that players would start from the beginning and do it all in one go. As a result, the resources and object names were all untranslated, which meant that I was out of luck if the tutorial needed me to refer to old elements.

Well, whatever. I tried to power through based on what I was able to actually absorb and work through what little tutorials there were of Pixel Game Maker MV. I aimed to make a Binding of Isaac-style twin-stick shooter. That was actually my first project with Game Maker Studio, and while my code with that was spaghetti, it at least worked. So, I wanted to repeat that to see how the experience compared.

The most important part of Pixel Game Maker MV is constructing objects. Objects are made up of animations and actions, with basic settings like movement speed, HP, etc that you can adjust. The action system has you setting down actions on a visible flowchart, with you setting up links between actions based on conditions. Like, say that you’re working in side-scrolling mode and wanted the character to jump. You link between your character’s idle action to a jumping action with a jumping animation attached; with the link based on the condition that a certain button is pressed. It’s all very structured.

However, structure can have its problems. After putting in sprites from a separate thing I’m working on, I tried to figure out how to shoot in four directions and ran into a problem with this structure. How the game’s bullet system works is really strict: you can only choose to fire projectiles in a specific direction or from whatever direction the character is facing. This obviously defeats the idea of a twin-stick shooter, so I went through some additional hoops to have my character face a direction when the shooting buttons are pressed. Compared to my experience with GMS, where I just did if “keyboard_check(vk_left/right/down/up) { create_instance(blah blah).angle” or something like that, the hoops to jump through for a comparable result is nonsense.

You may say, “ah, but you didn’t have to do any coding with Pixel Game Maker MV.” Look, here’s the thing. By learning to do the same thing in GMS, I learned principles that can be used throughout the engine and made for valuable experience; experience like this can also carry on for coding in general. By learning to do this in Pixel Game Maker MV… I only learned how to do something in Pixel Game Maker MV. It just feels like learning a useless skill.

I actively, genuinely hate this engine. Like if it was coding, I'd know that I'm screwing up. But to experience these problems and have no idea what's going on within a structure is actual madness. pic.twitter.com/oL8xnC2Mdr

— Dari (Evil Forme) (@scitydreamer) October 15, 2019

Then I ran into further problems. Despite bullets specifically being made to shoot straight ahead, bullets shot at an angle when I aimed down…and only when I aimed down. I couldn’t figure out how to actually hurt enemies. As it turns out, when importing graphics, it automatically sets up all the hitboxes… except for the hitboxes that check for attacks, for no real reason. I only learned about this from looking at the project file for the tutorial I was unable to finish. Even then, it just didn’t work. I kept looking between my project and the sample and I just couldn’t understand what the problem was. Again, with GMS, I could understand that the problem was with my code. In this, I need to figure out what part of the asinine structure disagrees with me.

That’s when it hit me: why would I want to use this when I could go back to using Game Maker Studio instead? Yeah, it lacks the visual component, but also, the visual component was just not helpful for fixing the problems I was having. The whole experience made me regret not picking up Game Maker Studio 2 from that sale a few weeks back. In fact, that’s the thing. Why get Pixel Game Maker MV when you could get Game Maker Studio 2? Like, if you’re more serious about game development, why mess around with something new and clunky when you can get the follow-up to something that’s already proven to be good?

There’s another thing to consider about Pixel Game Maker MV and it’s the culture. Like, the RPG Maker engines are considered to be esoteric to people past the basic functions, but years of forum posts and creators collaborating with each other has led to the creation of tutorials, tips and guides that have been applicable across the entire line. Pixel Game Maker MV, on the other hand, released earlier this year and while Playism has published a few guides on Steam, they only cover some basic stuff. As more people use Pixel Game Maker MV, people are going to figure out its eccentricities and post more guides. For now, however, there isn’t much to fall back on if you’re trying to figure out something specific.

Now, I’m not saying that you can’t make good things in Pixel Game Maker MV. As somebody that stans for RPG Maker, I’m annoyed that people are dismissive of its ability to make good stuff. Like, there’s even a few community showcase videos showing off some projects made in Pixel Game Maker MV and they look alright!

In fact, I think Pixel Game Maker MV is something that can improve. Besides being something that could be updated (hopefully with a working tutorial), there are also plug-ins that expand the functionality of the program. Sister engine, RPG Maker MV, also uses Javascript plug-ins that users can add. Now, in my opinion, RPG Maker MV is my least favorite RPG Maker engine due to being incredibly, poorly optimized in my personal experience. However, for the time I did use it, plug-ins made it bearable, especially plug-ins by Yanfly. VX Ace is my favorite RPG Maker engine, but it can’t do the stuff you can do with MV plug-ins without knowing how to code in Ruby. I think that Pixel Game Maker MV can have the same plug-in potential… better potential, actually, due to the engine aiming to let users do much more from the get-go.

Pixel Game Maker MV, in my opinion, is a mess. I can understand novices getting into it, but those novices will trip up on problems, whose solutions won’t really be applicable anywhere else. If you’re more serious about making a 2D game, I think you’re better off with the Game Maker Studio line of engines, because it at least has drag-and-drop features that limit the need to code for beginners. Pixel Game Maker MV could be better in the future, but as it stands, it’s not something I’m eager to use.

A Review Copy of Pixel Game Maker MV was provided by Playism for this Review

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Pixel Game Maker MV

$84.99

5

Score

5.0/10

Pros

• Has an interactive tutorial!
• Has a suite of default resources to rely on.
• I appreciate the easy way of making enemy AI.
• Has a lot of potential for improvement.

Cons

• Interactive tutorial is horribly flawed.
• Clunky structure to figure out.
• A lot of things still reliant on outside tutorials.
• Hard sell when other engines exist.