RPG Maker MV - Fun for the Family

RPG Maker MV is Absolutely Awesome!

I picked up RPG Maker MV during the Steam Autumn sale. It's an RPG game building program, that requires minimal coding, and is fairly easy to learn.

If you're familiar with something like Visual Studio or Photoshop the controls, buttons, and boxes will have a very familiar feel. If not, there are plenty of video tutorials on Youtube to get through the learning curve.

With three kids I was unimpressed with the "coding" applications on the web that are supposed to teach children how to code. They all had the same problem in that they wanted to show the concepts without any of the payoff - programming for the sake of programming. However, programming should always be about creation, building something, and adding value.

This is where RPG Maker MV comes in.

To show the kids a little bit of what was possible, I built a small map, connected it to a town, added a few NPCs and then showed them what *could be* accomplished. Then I walked away.

A few hours later (after asking me questions on how to do things here in there) they had created maps and towns. After a few days they had connected the maps, added NPCs and were thinking out their own story and characters. Out of the box, there are already a lot of functions that require no programming skills, but do require logic. In this way, it is a great introduction to basic programming concepts.

Now, RPG Maker MV can get much more complicated. There's a scripting engine that uses JavaScript. Additionally, there are plug-ins that can also be added. And there is an additional deploy-to-Steam tool that I'd really like to try at some point.

Overall, it's a solid tool and I'm glad I made the purchase.