RPG in a Box
84 comments
·May 10, 2025thomasfl
We humans are story telling species. RPG in Box is what got my 12 year old son interested in programing. Not python. Not AI. My son wants to tell stories and let others experience his stories. Programing is just a means to an end.
ar_lan
I think humans can have different motivations. For your son, it seems to be this.
When I was 12, I originally wanted to make video games, but found that I just loved building things and felt like programming was a magical toolbox. For me, it's not a means to an end, but the journey I actually like - I'm a builder, not a storyteller.
dazzawazza
When I give short talks at schools about game dev I try to make it super clear that we are all born game designers. We all make up games as children and a large part of that is story telling.
Every child has seen a face in a cloud and 'designed' something outside of themselves. This is where teachers are amazing. Teachers know how to nurture that against the pressure of society crushing it.
It was python+pygame that got one of my kids to learn to program and minecraft modding that got another to learn. Neither code now but that wasn't the point.
lukan
"Every child has seen a face in a cloud and 'designed' something outside of themselves. This is where teachers are amazing."
Hm. My teachers rather stopped me from looking outside the window to see faces in the clouds and placed me on a seat far away from any window so I could fully focus on the less interesting topics at hand, that society demands that I know. (Yet when I was succesfully done with all that schools, I found that I learned very little of practical value from my higher education anyway)
sevensor
There is a middle school in my town that was built with no windows, in the 1970s. For this innovation, it won a design award. The roof leaks terribly.
thadt
A few years ago I took a class of middle schoolers through a simple game dev course and rarely have I seen a group of kids so motivated. Using microStudio[1] they built the story, art, music, gameplay, and levels - I only helped a bit with the code. They kept asking about it long afterwards, so I eventually threw it up on a static site: http://uprag.quest (warning - flashy jump scares)
freetime2
My first thought on seeing the RPG in a Box homepage is that the graphics don't really do anything for me. Maybe it's just nostalgia having grown up playing Final Fantasy games for SNES, but when it comes to graphically simple games, I find that pixel art graphics resonate much more with me. So I would probably lean more toward RPG maker if I wanted to make an RPG.
But then I had a look at the community showcase [1], and it's really impressive what people are doing. I've played a lot of Minecraft, and have experienced genuine awe and terror in those environments. And some of the community showcase screenshots definitely give me that same immersive feeling that I get in Minecraft, and which pixel art games don't really offer.
I just had a look in the forums and it looks like you can do pixel art games in this engine, too. [2]
So I guess my advice is to maybe highlight more of the community creations on the homepage as well as first-person worlds.
Anyway, any tool that encourages and enables creativity is awesome. This is very cool!
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/rpginabox/comments/1hqx3h4/im_so_gr...
johnnyanmac
>So I would probably lean more toward RPG maker if I wanted to make an RPG
That may be a part of why they chose to take a 3d approach instead. RPG Maker has 20 years of iteration, so it's pretty hard to compete in that space. It's already a bit difficult as is to stand out in a 2D space to begin with.
Meanwhile, 3D is still a hard problem and Voxels give that flexibility to make assets by hand that fit into an overall game.
koonsolo
Hey, developer of RPG Playground here, and I agree with you.
My platform has moderate success (multiple games released each day), but to compete with RPG Maker means being 10x better. I was hoping to grab some of that market, but marketing wise it's incredibly difficult.
jamalaramala
Blender had moderate success when it was closed source, but not enough to pay its development, so it was going to die.
After its creator raised €100,000 to release it under the GPL, Blender became the leading open-source 3D tool it is today.
And they make enough money from recurring donations, service subscriptions, merchandise, conferences and trainings.
null
nottorp
> it's just nostalgia having grown up playing Final Fantasy games for SNES
What did Nintendo do to you people? I've grown up playing very pixelated games on the ZX Spectrum but I have zero nostalgia for those graphics.
kubb
It’s because the art for these games was so good, it didn’t feel like the hardware was a limitation, more like it just had a particular style.
I’m currently playing Octopath Traveler 2 and it completely recreates this feeling, the art is beautiful and very pixelated.
nottorp
Well, at least the Nintendo nostalgia is saving me money since I can't even look at fake pixelated graphics when I look for new indie games to play.
This is not the only way to do low budget graphics. Too bad very few creators realize it.
freetime2
Final Fantasy IV and VI, Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana, Ogre Battle, and Zelda: A Link to the Past all still look great to me to this day. I think it's just a timeless art style. And it's not all just nostalgia, the early 3d games which came in the next generation of consoles, and which I probably spent even more time playing, all look like trash to me.
vanderZwan
I guess the showcase is all stills mainly because it's a collection of screenshots shared on the forum, but I really would like to see the engine in motion! I'm not demanding great animation or anything. I get that individual passion projects are limited in their time and energy budget, and he voxel graphics editor looks intentionally minimalistic. But it would still feel more alive.
Kiro
The community showcase makes it look all over the place and hard to understand what it is (is it just another engine?). I love the current graphics on the homepage though. I'm also sure it's a good choice for their target audience who probably knows RPG Maker but want to make it 3D, which is in fact nostalgic since they probably grew up with Minecraft etc.
jamalaramala
You'll probably love [TIC-80](https://tic80.com/).
Max-q
There’s a new generation that played Minecraft when they where kids, so a new generation of nostalgia ;)
Buttons840
This is built on Godot: https://godotengine.org/showcase/rpg-in-a-box/
dandellion
It looks like it's mostly self-contained and it doesn't seem to have a clear way to leverage Godot, which is a pity. It uses it's own script language, own resources, etc. It'd be really interesting to have something like this, and have full access to Godot, use shaders, custom nodes, plugins like LimboAI, Beehave, etc.
lewispollard
If it's a Godot "game" then it should be pretty easy to mod that kinda stuff in, there are plenty of tools to do so.
garylkz
They do provide ability for users to export the project as Godot 4 if needed.
braggerxyz
By looking at the screenshots I thought this looks a lot like Godot. So there is my answer ;)
dang
Related:
RPG in a Box: A grid-based, voxel-style game engine built on Godot - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37502218 - Sept 2023 (21 comments)
hungryhobbit
Inventing your own programming language for your personal project is a TERRIBLE idea, and will likely doom the project in the long run.
Languages require a huge amount of support, and you're going to be way too busy building an RPG maker to properly support a whole language. That means you're just going to wind up with a shitty unsupported custom language no one wants or knows how to use.
alexjplant
Wouldn't Lua be the classic/obvious choice for this application since it has such inertia [1]? I remember RPG Maker supporting Ruby back in the day but a lot has changed in the past 20 years...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Lua_(programming_lang...
krapp
In a better universe Godot went with Lua instead of GDScript.
bbkane
They actually started with Lua! They made GDScript due to https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/about/faq.html#what-w...
tbrownaw
> Inventing your own programming language for your personal project is a TERRIBLE idea, and will likely doom the project in the long run.
It's something that everyone should do at least once, ideally on a hobby project where it wouldn't be that hard to rip it back out if needed.
simplify
Terrible idea how so? You just said it's a personal project. What's the harm in learning and doing what you want? :)
90s_dev
Seeing stuff like this makes me so excited! Partly because I love game engines and making games, and partly because it becomes more evidence to me that programmers will really like my project when I finally release it! Hopefully next Monday!
90s_dev
If the author is here:
> It's similar to some other languages, like Lua, and is very easy to pick up if you have knowledge of basic programming concepts.
Why not just use Lua or one of the forks like Luau?
tosmatos
I'd thought they would keep GDScript since it's built on Godot, especially since you can export your projects to Godot afterwards. Not really that bad of a problem since GDScript's easy to pick up
jamalaramala
Looks like a really nice and polished project!
A note to the author -- if you ever considered going open source, you could use the same strategy used by Ton Roosendaal to open source Blender:
In July 2002, Ton launched a campaign called "Free Blender" to raise money (100,000 EUR) directly from the community. To everyone's surprise and delight the campaign reached the goal in only seven short weeks.
In October 2002, Blender was released under the GNU GPL. Roosendaal created the Blender Foundation to manage development, and the project kept growing from there. Today, Blender is one of the most popular 3D creation tools, used by professionals, hobbyists, and even studios.
Being free and open source allowed Blender to power countless creative projects, including the 2025 Oscar-winning film Flow.
This would've been much harder if the tool had stayed behind a paywall.
noduerme
This is a great comment. It's notable that this is a possible path to mutual success.
But on the other hand, $100k seems like quite a small one-time payout for a huge amount (obviously years) of effort, unless someone has exhausted all other plans to continue trying to compete with established software by commercializing their project.
jamalaramala
Yes, $100K was a relatively small sum -- but the company that owned the rights was going bankrupt, and Blender was going to die.
For a lucrative game, a reasonable value would be 2 to 4 years of earnings.
For example: if the product makes $10K/month:
$10k × 36 (a mid-range multiple) = $360,000
Suppafly
>In July 2002, Ton launched a campaign called "Free Blender" to raise money (100,000 EUR) directly from the community. To everyone's surprise and delight the campaign reached the goal in only seven short weeks.
Seems like he should have set a higher goal.
the_real_cher
This is not a rocket propelled grenade startup
jhbadger
I'm more surprised nobody's brought up RPG, the classic ptogramming language (which, like COBOL, isn't as dead as you might think)
kayge
When I saw the headline I was definitely hoping for some fun new tool for the IBMi server I maintain, but I knew the chances were slim :)
wsc981
Thanks, the title had me confused.
the_real_cher
Same, got a little excited at first
Kiro
I honestly feel bad for anyone primarily associating RPG with weapons and not the beautiful world of role-playing games. You're missing out.
__turbobrew__
Have you ever shot an RPG? You’re missing out.
the_real_cher
don't most RPGs have weapons?
animuchan
And they don't put stuff in boxes either! What an enormous clickbait.
braggerxyz
This looks a lot like Godot to me. So I would rather go with Godot instead. But nevertheless this looks like an awesome tool, less friction for creating story driven games is a good thing. Maybe I give it a try.
q2dg
No open source, no fun
aloisdg
Yes especially when it is build on free and open source software. Of course they don't have to, but it is always better.
As a user I wont dedicate myself to a software, the community can't fork. Like the enshitiffication risk is far to high.
dmd
Linux is free and open source software. Should everything built on Linux be free?
gcc is free and open source software. Should everything compiled with gcc be free?
apache is free and open source software. Should every website be noncommercial?
krapp
>Linux is free and open source software. Should everything built on Linux be free?
Yes.
>gcc is free and open source software. Should everything compiled with gcc be free?
Yes.
>apache is free and open source software. Should every website be noncommercial?
Yes.
khazhoux
I’m very happy that there are modern equivalents to Adventure Construction Set! Seems like that idea was lost for decades.
Five megabytes for the acorn64 rotating box, because it’s a GIF. And a bad GIF that can’t play at its intended speed for most of its rotation, and so has speed jitters (without delving: I presume it’s due to format limitations, as it looks to be using more than 256 colours; see also https://www.biphelps.com/blog/The-Fastest-GIF-Does-Not-Exist). Ugh. `ffmpeg -i acorn64.gif acorn64.mp4` shrinks it to under 350kB, looking about the same except that it now plays smoothly. And will use a lot less power.
(I noticed this because the page was loading unreasonably slowly for unclear reasons. In cases like this, a GIF <img> has a worse failure mode than <video>.)