Tag Archives: Kadokawa Games

Root Letter: Eleven Letters, Eight People, One Truth

Kadokawa Games’ Root Letter, first in their new Kadokawa Games Mystery series, quietly snuck out onto the market at the end of October, just four months after its Japanese release.

The proposed series is set to be a collection of visual novel-cum-adventure game hybrids for PlayStation platforms that feature real-world locations, artwork from Love Plus character designer Mino Taro and a cast of fictional actresses who will play different roles in each game. The plan, presumably, is to create a series of adventures that, while distinct in their own right in terms of story, will have numerous thematic and stylistic similarities throughout that make them feel like “part of a set”.

So far, all we have to judge the series on is its inaugural installment Root Letter, but fortunately it’s a very strong start indeed, eminently worthy of your time if you’ve ever enjoyed the Ace Attorney or Danganronpa games.

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RPG Maker MV: All About Plugins

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So you’ve got your basic game up and running, and now you want to add more to it? Great!

Aside from the other Event Commands available straight out of the box, most of which are relatively self-explanatory, the biggest addition to RPG Maker MV is the Plugins system.

Previous versions of RPG Maker from XP onwards have included various means of extending the basic engine’s functionality through scripting, but RPG Maker MV makes this enormously flexible aspect of the software more accessible and straightforward to use than ever before.

So let’s take a look at what plugins can do for us!

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RPG Maker MV: Getting Started with Events

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It’s time to breathe some life into our world!

In RPG Maker, you add interactivity through Events. These are lists of commands that are attached to an object on a map, coupled with a trigger of some sort, be it the player walking up to an NPC and pressing the action button, or the number of flatulent wombles the player is carrying in their bag being greater than 13.

Events are essentially a simple form of programming, but don’t run away screaming — you don’t have to memorise lots of different commands, define functions or anything complicated like that. All you need is an ability to think things through in a logical manner and an awareness of the options you have available to you.

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RPG Maker MV: Basic Mapping

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Let’s make a game!

Well, part of one anyway. Over the course of the next three articles, I’ll introduce you to how RPG Maker MV does business: how you create maps, fill them with things to do and, in the final part, how to go beyond the constraints of the basic engine.

Today we’re going to take a look at the most basic skill you will need to get an RPG Maker MV game up and running: mapping. Like any creative tool, if you don’t master this essential first, there’s little point in going further. Learn to walk before you run before you fly, and all that.

The aim for today is to make a small town and the beginning of a dungeon beneath it. Not the most ambitious or sprawling game, sure, but more than enough to give you a look at how to create both maps. In the next article, we’ll add some life to these locations with Events.

If you’re ready, then, let’s get going! If you want to follow along but don’t have a copy of MV, you can download a trial version from the official website.

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How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love a Dungeon Crawler

I was something of a latecomer to the RPG party; yes, I was one of those people who discovered RPGs with Final Fantasy VII.

Consequently, I didn’t really grow up with first-person perspective grid-based dungeon crawlers like The Bard’s Tale and the early Dungeons & Dragons games. To the teenage me, an “RPG” was a narrative-heavy game with predefined characters who had limited customisation, and in which battles and boss fights were but punctuation in the overall experience’s storybook rather than the central attraction.

This isn’t to say I didn’t play any first-person dungeon crawlers, of course; just not many of them. And, while I enjoyed some of them — the original Lands of Lore from Westwood Studios being probably the most standout example — I still found the “J” approach to RPGs to be the most compelling and interesting to my specific tastes.

Which is why I was so surprised to find myself enraptured with Kadokawa Games and Experience’s Demon Gaze, a title which recently made it to the West courtesy of localisation specialists NIS America.

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