RPG in a Box
29 comments
·May 10, 2025freetime2
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.
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.
thomasfl
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.
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.
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.
braggerxyz
By looking at the screenshots I thought this looks a lot like Godot. So there is my answer ;)
chrismorgan
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>.)
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)
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.
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
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.
the_real_cher
This is not a rocket propelled grenade startup
2d8a875f-39a2-4
Clicked expecting some sort of 3d printed rocket-propelled grenade launcher.
TFA is not that.
qmr
I wonder how it compares to RPGMaker.
khazhoux
I’m very happy that there are modern equivalents to Adventure Construction Set! Seems like that idea was lost for decades.
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...
[2] https://rpginabox.com/forum/d/547-the-twilight-isle/8