Kyle Labriola

1. I notice someone complaining about something in our game that bothers them but isn't crucially important, or general complaints like "the updates are so slow to come out, this game is dead."
2. I am faced with a moral choice: do I tell anyone on the team that I saw these complaints...or do I keep it to myself?

I'm always trying to be cognizant of not inflicting stress or psychic damage on other team members just because some randos are complaining about something.

Like, I try to develop this mental wall between me and the audience, and another wall between me and the team, where something needs to really pass my "Is this worth worrying about?" test to make it through the barriers.

Because boy there's a lot of hot takes and complaints out there just kinda getting flung around in casual conversation. And I feel like if we take them all to heart, it'll just make daily life miserable. Which I wouldn't want to inflict on anyone, and it might hurt our productivity and motivation anyway.

And god forbid if I tell someone and then they drop everything they were doing to try to appease that player / those players with the complaint. Maybe ignorance is bliss for this kind of thing.

I'm curious if bigger teams have someone whose role it is to sift through all the online opinion chatter and try to pluck out the ones that are worth telling the team about. (looks up definition of "PR") ...crap is this my job??

Whenever people bring up pixel art, as an artform, a weird new catchphrase flashes through my mind.

“Pixel art: it’s the art of the people!”

(Yes, I have even said this out loud, by reflex…)

Maybe a stupid catchphrase. But what I MEAN by it is that it’s an approachable artform that kind of helps to “level the playing field.”

Here is a quick reference sheet of tips that I'm writing purely for myself to remember, but I thought it might be useful for other beginners, so I'm posting it here.

The purpose of this guide is a list of settings to tweak in order to quickly make your RPG Maker game feel how you want it to feel, rather than feeling like out-of-the-box default RPG Maker.

You might not care whether or not your game "feels like default RPG Maker", and that's totally fine. But if you do care, here is a way to change or undo some of RPG Maker's default settings to tailor it to what you need.

In general, RPG Maker has a lot of weird bells-and-whistles that make it feel not-quite retro, not-quite modern. It's kind of in its own pocket universe. If you want your game to feel more intentional and more from a particular era of console/handheld gaming, you probably want to tweak these settings. You can change and trim out a lot of bells-and-whistles so that your game feels more streamlined and less distracting.

This guide is written for RPG Maker MZ + VisuStella MZ Plugin. However, I think that you can probably find a lot of similar options in RPG Maker MV + Yanfly Engine Plugin.

Guide begins under the Read More.

If you're the kind of person that likes purchasing fonts, tilesets, characters, UI assets, etc. from itch for your game projects, this week is a good week to do it. A lot of creators have put stuff on sale for the itch.io Summer Sale.

Zaebucca: Tilesets, characters

somepx: fonts

LimeZu: Tilesets, props, UI

Seliel the Shaper: Tilesets, props, characters

finalbossblues: Tilesets, characters, icons

backterria: Tilesets, props, icons

Zerie: Characters

ELV Games: Tilesets, characters, icons

Bagong Games: Tilesets, characters

There are probably many more I've missed, but you can find all of the game assets on sale this week on this page.