Good RPG Tutorial?

[GandalftheGray]

Hey all, Im fairly new to love (by new I mean I've gotten past the physics platformer stage haha) and I have found that there are not many Love2D tutorials on anything really out there. I have followed SockMunkee Dev's tutorials on YouTube, along with the tutorials in the wiki, but I am now trying to figure out if there are any good tutorials for the creation of a RPG, or even a top game similar to RPG. If there aren't, any resources on how I would go about doing something of the likes are greatly appreciated.

Thanks to anyone who replies!

[Jasoco]

Which part of an RPG? The scripting part? The damage calculation part?

For the second, you should go on GameFAQs and look up some RPGs. Most of them will have FAQs dedicated completely to how to calculate damage and power and other stuff. My two favorites are Super Mario RPG and Dragon Quest VIII. (Even though it's not finished and probably never will be.)

[Muris]

After spending almost 2 hours of writing a post I realised that not every rpg has a huge story like final fantasy, so I simply decided to rewrite my post. Also my post is more of a posting general stuff than specificly how to make rpg type of an answer.

To start off I think most people have and will always tell that rpgs are ernomous projects, but I guess that depends more of what kind of rpg you want to make.

I also think its important to instantly choose: are you gonna monetize your product or not, because it is going to affect to a lot of choices later on.

First off I think that you have to be honest to yourself and think how good of a programmer you are. Like in general what are your skill levels on things. Are you good at drawing? I am not, and I cannot even count how many of projects died because of not being able to accept my artistic skills. If you aren't good at drawing, are you willing to improve your skill as an artist / outsource drawing / make a game that requires very limited effort in drawing like ascii graphics / different colors on squares? The latest thing I've done is very pixelated graphics, 16x16 tiles, and even with my horrible skills I can atleast think of some of the art semi decent. Upscaling low res graphics I guess in my eyes has some great value.

Are you good at programming? I would consider myself a decent one, probably an average Joe of a coder. I am not the best in the world, nor even the top level or professional programmer, but I have been programming quite some time. Now if you are a good programmer, you probably know what to expect from timewise in programming, on the other hand if you are new to programming, it is time consuming thing. Something like spending a year of time for programming and having almost no results is not unheard of.

These leads to an important point, which often gets negletted by people (including me): planning. You should consider things like how much time do I have? Am I willing to spend next 2-3 years coding this game or not? These things comes especially important when talking about RPG. RPGs, the ones with story and stuff like Final Fantasy, are by no means small projects. On the otherhand RPGs like Nethack etc. which focus more on just killing stuff with less emphasis on story are more manageable. So defining a goal, what you want to do.

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Planning
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So how would I do this, I would start defining a goal: I want to make an rpg. Now since RPGs do fall into several category I would have to think what kind of rpg?

JRPG like Final Fantasy, since I am 1 man team with not so good graphical skills it would make several years of time, so this would be out of question for me.

Rogue-like, this would be more likely to be done with single person. I wouldn't need to write that much dialogs, and I would probably get by with worse graphics. I could even use ascii graphics. I would need to put heavy emphasis on balancing stuffs.

Side scroller with rpg elements? This would be a nice way if I had already started a side scroller, then adding some elements of rpg like conversations or dialogs, adding some story to it, maybe even some power ups. The projects size would be a lot bigger than rogue-like but probably I could be dealing with less amounts of types of items, and needing to consider balance a lot less. Probably still quite a big project to begin with.

Any other kind of a game where characters have roles?

After I have thought about the concept/type of my game, next I would need to think what do I need to do, what is the absolute minimum what I need. In other words I am trying to break down the question into smaller pieces.

So I could list down some ideas with priority, like 1 = absolute must, 2 = good to have, 3 = nice to have or something like that
1. Map, this could be randomly generated or done with something like Tiled
1. At least background story for main character(s). I don't think rpgs would be that enjoyable (my personal opinion) when there is no story at all.
1. Goal, how to defeat the game. What is the purpose of playing my game. The route from start to finish at least a rough sketch. For example: You start in a village. Your village gets burned down. You see your parent being slayed by a person. You want to take revenge on this person. Defeat the person to win the game.
1. Balancing. How would the game feel if the first fight would be almost uncompleteable, or maybe after first dungeon, you would have to spend 20 hours to level up your character in order to be able to survive in next place, just to realise that everything after that has no challenge at all. Instead you could propotionally increase the games difficulty.
1. Dialogs/conversations. I would want my game to have conversations being shown. I like to read stories in RPGs, it might not suit everyone, but I want to have story in my game.
1. Music / sounds. I think RPG must have sounds and music. I could go with SXFR to generate sounds, and maybe trying to find free to use music.
1. Graphics. I could go on with ascii graphics, but I would still prefer to have graphics.
1. Minimum amount of items with stats and powers.
1. With the dialog and conversation, there would most likely need to be a scripting system for creating cutscenes and something like that.
1. Possibly needing to create somekind of AI, depending of the game and its mechanics. For example something like Final Fantasy 7 has less complex AI than Sword of Mana, which probably again has less complex AI than Final Fantasy Tactics.

2. Tons of different items. I think its quite core of a rpg to have a massive list of items with different kinds of stats, but at least I would need to define bare minimum of items.
2. A lot of playable characters roles and such.
... A lot of more

While defining goals you should probably keep in mind the lenght of the game, the time available for developing and how enjoyable the game truly is?

I think this is probably the point where I should stop with my post, instead of writing more. Especially when it is not really answering the question at all.

After all this long post, my answer to your question: "How to make a rpg?" is that the question itself is such a broad thing, that you cannot answer to it. You have to start with smaller things.

Something completely different and probably isn't for everyone but I find it incredibly important for me to have a TODO task list. This is something that pumps up my productivitiy a lot. When I define a task, I can constantly keep myself track on what I am doing, instead of constantly side tracking myself from the making of game into something like I wanna just see how this and that works, even tho I would never actually need it. For example I would suddenly want to spend hours and hours on making something, and when its done, I realise that I cannot use this type of software that I just built. Also with TODO-list I can simply pick a new task once you're completed with the old one, instead of being unproductive with the time.

[GandalftheGray]

First off, that is one amazing wall of text Muris, thank you! Personally I love long answers like that because, while it may not answer my question directly, I still get a lot from it, not unike this post. So thank you a lot, I highly appreciate it.

Jasoco, thank you for directing me to GameFAQs, previously I had never heard of it, so thank you for that.

That about answered my questions in two answers, as usual haha, so thanks again guys (or gals, how about just internet people?)

[adrix89]

JRPG like Final Fantasy, since I am 1 man team with not so good graphical skills it would make several years of time, so this would be out of question for me.

That is a question of scope.
You can make a 1-3 hour game in RPG Maker pretty easily.

I could even use ascii graphics.

Don't do that if you ever want to sell it.
Basic 32x32 tiles are good enough and not that hard even you are incompetent artist.

So I could list down some ideas with priority,

Priority number 1: Have interesting gameplay. That means interesting combat and interesting resource and skills management.
If you do not have STRONG gameplay then that means you will be judged solely on the merits of story, and story is a TIME CONSUMING HOLE

Something completely different and probably isn't for everyone but I find it incredibly important for me to have a TODO task list.

What is this? Did someone ask for a Workflowy account? Don't mind if you do.