Beginning RPG Maker MV

Well written. Engaging. An enjoyable read and a fantastic resource for someone like me who learns better via books than via videos online. The author does a great job of explaining key concepts in easy to understand ways. And he does it in the form of walking you through creating a video game. So once you’re finished, you feel proud of what you’ve accomplished and can easily reference what you learned, when taking the next steps to create your very own game. If you were like me and saw the amazing potential of the RPG Maker game, but had little to know idea how to effectively tap that potential, then this book is right for you.

Bought as a gift for my daughter as per her request, so can't give an full review but it obviously is what she wants.

Great Resource , really help me get my project rolling. I recommend for anyone new or that wants a solid refresher, I will keep it as a permanent part of my resource library.

The book is as stated and was delivered promptly.

I would like to start this review by first thanking the author for writing and publishing a book about RPG Maker MV. It's a great game engine that can accomplish a lot with just a little effort and it deserves a book. That's one star. Second, I did learn some interesting things from this book even though I've used RPG Maker casually for years. One star for that. I'm actually presenting a workshop on using RPG Maker MV for our local game dev group, so I bought this book to brush up and say "I've read the book on RPG Maker MV!" Also as part of the workshop I've been looking for resources to recommend if people want to learn more about RPG Maker. Unfortunately, I will not be recommending this book. I just can't. What other negative reviews say is true: This book is NOT for beginners! Despite the title. It uses advanced concepts to accomplish simple tasks from soon after the beginning. But instead of focusing on that, I want to present what a learner would expect a book teaching RPG Maker to be versus what this book is. I believe a teaching book, especially one aimed at beginners, would be effective if it followed this kind of a pattern: 1) Here is a concept. 2) Here is an explanation of that concept. 3) Here is a basic example using that concept. 4) More examples of the concept gradually increasing in complexity. Then maybe combine the new concept with previously learned concepts for greater complexity and creative freedom. 5) Optional challenges and encouragement for the reader to use what they've learned in making their own game. 6) Review and/or summary of the concept learned before moving on to the next new concept. Sometimes this book follows that pattern in the beginning. But the author's approach is generally more like: I'm making a game. It's my own game with my own ideas and I already know what I'm doing and have a lot of experience with this software. As I make this game, I'll write down what I did. And you get to read what I did and follow along with what I did and hopefully do exactly what I did yourself at the same time. Now I've hit the next step in making my game. I'll use that opportunity to introduce a new concept. But first, I need to make a new map with new enemies, which we already know how to do, but read along as I do it again. Here's all the details for my new map and all the stats for my new enemies. Now here's how I'm going to use that concept I mentioned 10 pages ago. I'm going to use that new concept to continually detect the X and Y position of the player and check if the "FoughtBoss" switch I did three chapters ago is on and if X=21 and Y=16 and the switch is on, then that will allow this concept to unlock before another event checks if... I hope as you were reading that last paragraph of my review that you were getting confused and maybe even a little angry at me for being so unclear. Because that's what it is like reading this book. That is how you will feel emotionally as you go through it. Which brings me to my final point: the price. Looking at my Amazon order history I paid $28.80 for the Kindle version of this book. I'm 60% through it and I'm done, I can't go on. I'm bored and lost and it gives me a headache to read anymore. Part of that is my own fault. I haven't been following along and making the exact same game in RPG Maker. I've been reading and as I learn something new, I test it out in RPG Maker in my own games. But as the book goes on, I'm actually finding less new concepts to learn. I then got to a point where I was just skimming for explanations of concepts, or briefly looking over the author's event scripts and thinking "Ok, that's how he did that. Interesting." But those moments became less and less too. Now I'm actually really confused and lost. Yes, I'm partially to blame for that because I started skimming, but the poor structuring of the book is the other half of the story. So in conclusion, I can't recommend this book, especially at the price I paid. There are YouTube videos out there that teach RPG Maker much more effectively and are free. Lots of them. And RPG Maker has an amazing fan and creator community that has tutorials, forums, scripts you can download, and many other kinds of resources. Given that reality, maybe a book isn't the best way to teach RPG Maker and the author really should be praised for making the effort, vain though it was. However, I don't feel that way. I feel like I was going through the notes of some kid with hours of free time and years of experience using RPG Maker while he made yet another game, and though he took very detailed notes of making his game, he then charged over $25 for other people to read them.

I took a chance on this because it was the longest, seemingly most in-depth RPG Maker MV guide I could find. I have ordered the software for Nintendo Switch and I hoped this would help get me going. To be fair, there is a decent amount of content here. The main problem is the organization or complete lack thereof. It was very hard to follow. There's really advanced 'tricks' to efficient ways to do simple things which actually makes the software even harder to learn. I am requesting a refund, the day I purchased this. For me, it is completely unhelpful.

I read through this book myself to assist my grandchild in going through it and learning RPG Maker MV. I would have to say this book is not a very well written piece of work. It relies too heavily on the user to guess what the writer wants and also expects the user to know more than he or she already would being a beginner. I could reference page after page of such cases. That in my opinion means the book is not for true beginners. The book also contains way too many references to Beginning RPG Maker VX Ace which this writer also wrote. Personally I do not care (and no one should) what was previously recommended or done in that book as it has no relevance to RPG Maker MV. In some cases it actually could be confusing to the user if they mistakenly took reference from that book. The writer has the user perform tasks or try to at least and then later shows how it is done. For some instances this is OK, for other it is less than OK because the reader has to do their home work outside the book. Home work is ok, but there are instances where if you did perform the task your own way you have to redo it his way afterwards so that there are no conflicts in the making of the game. OK, this one is a killer. The writer has the user write code that is not possible to write in the order it is shown in the book. Why? Because the writer has the end user try to write code with in game items, skills and alike which are not yet defined. So you start to write the code and then have to stop, go onto another section to create the items and skills and then go back to the beginning to continue the code. This back and forth, back and forth is nothing but annoying. It did though teach my granddaughter how to write copious notes on where code is missing or incomplete. One last note as an example of poor editing and writing. This is code error on page 219 at the bottom of the page. (pic included) Code reads: "I have \V[15] Treasure Notes for sale. Would you" Should read: "I have \V[13] Treasure Notes for sale. Would you" Variable '15' does not exist and you will always get a return value of '0'. If you use '13', which is a defined variable you will get the correct response. As a background I have read some 80+ books on various programming languages over the last 37 years. I have read possibly another 100+ on different software packages such as Unity, Blender, etc. I do believe I know how to read a book and this one just does not cut it for its intended purpose. Many, like my granddaughter would be better served by watching youtube video tutorials.

I got this in a Humble Bundle for a super reduced cost, I cannot recommend grabbing a bunch of beginning game dev resources in Humble Bundle enough! It was helpful to step through the examples and learn what the limitations of this engine are. The book is overly verbose but it was helpful, I've finished two games so far so it got me into the thick of it pretty quickly haha.