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...
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.
You'll probably love [TIC-80](https://tic80.com/).
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.
There’s a new generation that played Minecraft when they where kids, so a new generation of nostalgia ;)
> 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.
>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.