Rpg Maker Developers Group

Hi Everyone

I hope you are all doing well. Before making my first thread I wanted to respect the community here, so I read the support rules and took time to do some independent reading. After completing Driftwood Gaming's basic tutorials for MZ, I quickly learned there's an abundance of tutorials, and training resources out there, but it also feels like drinking from a firehose. The purpose of this thread is to outline my interests, goals, and vision. I'm hoping others can point me in the right direction to tutorials, plugins libraries, editors, etc., that better match these goals.

the next few sections give a bit of background about myself and the type of project i'm trying to create. If this isn't important, feel free to skip to my research section at the end which contains most of my questions.

About myself
It's been about 15 years since I seriously played around with any RPG maker, and I can immediately tell it's come a long way from Don Miguel's early work. This is a personal hobby I'm looking to pick back up, and not something I have monetary ambitions. I'm also no interested in skirting licensing or intellectual property standards. In other words, I intend to fully pay for anything I use that is not free for public use.

Engine preferences
I used a number of RPG maker engines over the years, but majority of my experience was on RPG Maker 2k3 (purchased copy). After reviewing everything out there, I've decided to use RPG Maker MZ, and have. licensed copy through Steam. I'm running off a 2025 Macbook Air, but do keep a small PC laptop nearby for things that are easier to run on windows. There are two projects I am working on, and I've listed the detailed parameters below.

Project 1 - Puzzle Game
I have a 10 month year old that is too young for video games, but one day may have interest. I'm looking to make a simple puzzle game without a battle system. I'd like to keep this game as self contained in the original RPG maker engine with minimal use of plugins or DLC. While the purpose is to give something to my daughter in the future, the project can also serve as a sandbox for learning the fundamentals of the engine without overcomplicating things.

Project 2 - Standard RPG
I have an old RPG project on RM2k3 that was never completed. I'm looking to transport that story into RMMZ. I expect it to be a tedious task, but c'est la vie. There's a few things that I am still deciding on, but the direction I take will largely depend on the options available on RMMZ.

• Character design - I'm not a fan of the chibi style generator. I find the smaller body proportion leaves little room for customization (fist pump, shrugging, etc). I found the character designs in RM2K3 much more appealing, but it's also my understanding the pixel ratio from RM2K3 to RMMZ isn't user friendly. In short, I'm looking for a character design that looks and feels like RM2k3, but not restricting other designs.
• Tileset design - Again, I am more partial to the RM2K3 designs, but not married to it. Most importantly, the style will need to look okay behind the character design.
• Battle system - I'm not opposed to the in-game battle system, as coding isn't my biggest strength. I am, however, particular about each weapon having its own animation when using attack. I understand that this is more limited in RMMZ compared to RM2k3. Without going down a rabbit hole, I'm looking for any plugins or tutorials with a battle system closer to FFVII (original). Each character would have its own class, weapons type, but a magic system dependent on multiple items from a specific magic equipment type.
• Credit Option - this is more of a personal preference for professionalism. I'm not sure if there's a plugin that allows you to add a Credits option at the title screen or main menu. It would simply run a common event that scrolls the names and groups who deserve recognition for any of the plugins, character designs, music, etc seen throughout the game. It would also serve as a digital bibliography as the game is being developed. (update - I found this)

My Research
So here's what I've collected so far from my own research. Open to any feedback or guidance the community may have. I admit in advance, that while I may try to sound like I know what I'm talking about here, I really don't. This is just how I've tried to make sense out of the enormous pile of impressive resources this community has created for each other.

• RMMZ Basic Tutorials
  
  • I started with the Driftwood Gaming basic tutorial series of youtube videos. It was a good refresher on most things I learned on RM2k3 but provided a good primer.
  • If there are other basic tutorials worth a look at, i'm very much open to see it.
• Advanced Tutorials
  
  • Most advance tutorials beyond the standard RMMZ engine seem to revolve around three things
    • i) custom assets
    • ii) plugins
    • iii) third party tools
  • It appears the best place for tutorials beyond the standard RMMZ engine would be the yanfly.moe wiki page.
  • Youtube is filled with numerous tutorials, but relying on the algorithm is an aimlessly wandering nightmare.
  • From what I can tell, each dev group on the yanfly wiki specializes on something
    • Ækashics Librarium = pre-made sprite assets
    • Caz Wolf = pre-made icon assets
    • Team Artrix = customizable menu plugins
    • VisuStella = main plugin library, generators, misc assets
• Purchasing DLC
  
  • I found the following reliable places to purchase DLC both plugins and assets
    • Steam online shop
    • Yanfly.moe
    • RMMZ.web download section
    • Komodo Plaza
  • Is it better to get your resources from one place, or can you pick and choose?
• Installing Plugins
  
  • I assume VisuStella isn't the only dev group to design plugins, but mixing the plugins between developers can cause compatibility issues?
  • I'm assuming the safest plugin library to use for beginners without much coding experience would be the VisuStella MZ Tier Hierarchy System.
  • Yanfly.moe provides a RMMZ specific Troubleshooting Page for plugin errors.
• Third party tools
  
  • This is the part of my research I got a bit lost with.
  • These tools usually centre around customizing asset designs like tilesets and character sets.
  • I'm looking to learn more about third party tools that can be used to customize character sets and tilesets.
  • When I was using RM2k3 I would just use MS Paint to customize tiles and character, which I'm assuming is pretty rudimentary compared to tools today.
  • Here's what I did find on my own
    • The Stella Character Generator is quite nice, but not sure yet if it's the tool I will use.
    • GIMP or Asperite is a better tool to use than MS paint.
    • Tiled allows for more advance tileset management, but I don't think I'm willing to go that far.
  • I'm not really sure where I stand on all this yet. In a perfect world, I'd be able to combine the look and feel of RM2k3 assets into RMMZ, but the difference in pixel ratios seems to make this a very complicated process. The alternative is a completely different asset style that looks similar to RM2k3 but more compatible with the default pixel ratios of RMMZ.

Thank you for reading through all this. I appreciate your time and help. I apologize in advance, as I'm sure there's already one or more threads somewhere that catalogs everything I'm looking for, I simply could not find it.

I'll end this post the same way I started it. I was truly impressed to see such a strong resource sharing community for RPG makers after so many years of being away.

All the best
MDR