[HN Gopher] RPG in a Box
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RPG in a Box
Author : skibz
Score : 284 points
Date : 2025-05-10 08:52 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (rpginabox.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (rpginabox.com)
| Buttons840 wrote:
| This is built on Godot: https://godotengine.org/showcase/rpg-in-
| a-box/
| braggerxyz wrote:
| By looking at the screenshots I thought this looks a lot like
| Godot. So there is my answer ;)
| dandellion wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| They do provide ability for users to export the project as
| Godot 4 if needed.
| 90s_dev wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| dang wrote:
| 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)
| deafpolygon wrote:
| They should take advantage of viral marketing: "I heard you like
| game engines, so here's a game engine in a game engine."
| kace91 wrote:
| Sorry to be the one to tell you, but that meme is at this point
| older than many gamers themselves.
| pessimizer wrote:
| 2004(!)
| qmr wrote:
| I wonder how it compares to RPGMaker.
| freetime2 wrote:
| 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
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 EUR100,000 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.
| koonsolo wrote:
| Blender is great, I also use it. It's a nice example on
| how a non-developer tool is successful with open source.
|
| There are/were plenty of open source RPG makers, but they
| never gained any real traction.
|
| I considered open sourcing my product in the past (did so
| with a previous game), so maybe one day. I still have
| some big things planned :).
| mkesper wrote:
| I think Blender was (and still is) exceptionally good at
| community building. Just freeing your product might not
| get you enough traction by itself.
| popcorncowboy wrote:
| Clearly you are unfamiliar with the process. Step 1, open
| source project. Step 2. Step 3, profit.
| Suppafly wrote:
| >Just freeing your product might not get you enough
| traction by itself.
|
| Plus not everyone wants to give their product away. I see
| that advice all the time here and reddit and other
| places, "just opensource it" as if that's a solution to
| every problem a creator might have. I even saw it on a
| gamedev subreddit where a guy was asking how to make more
| money and people were saying to make it opensource, as if
| making it free would somehow increase sales for him.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Blender itself is also over 20 years old. And it
| struggled a lot even when opt source until several things
| came together at once. A mix of a UX overhaul, autodesk
| pissing off the community, and outreach yielding fruit as
| corporations experimented with adoption.
|
| I'm not sure if we had that perfect storm in game engines
| yet. Unity fumbled big time, but Godot wasn't quite
| mature enough to fully take advantage of that
| opportunity.
| vanderZwan wrote:
| 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.
| Max-q wrote:
| There's a new generation that played Minecraft when they where
| kids, so a new generation of nostalgia ;)
| jamalaramala wrote:
| You'll probably love [TIC-80](https://tic80.com/).
| nottorp wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| Kiro wrote:
| 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.
| chrismorgan wrote:
| 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>.)
| matt3210 wrote:
| Uh is this a AI thing?
| the_real_cher wrote:
| This is not a rocket propelled grenade startup
| wsc981 wrote:
| Thanks, the title had me confused.
| the_real_cher wrote:
| Same, got a little excited at first
| Kiro wrote:
| 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__ wrote:
| Have you ever shot an RPG? You're missing out.
| animuchan wrote:
| And they don't put stuff in boxes either! What an enormous
| clickbait.
| jhbadger wrote:
| I'm more surprised nobody's brought up RPG, the classic
| ptogramming language (which, like COBOL, isn't as dead as you
| might think)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_RPG
| kayge wrote:
| 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 :)
| thomasfl wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| "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 wrote:
| 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.
| pepdar wrote:
| Sounds like Smithsburg Middle School in Maryland.
| thadt wrote:
| 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)
|
| [1] https://microstudio.dev
| ar_lan wrote:
| 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.
| khazhoux wrote:
| I'm very happy that there are modern equivalents to Adventure
| Construction Set! Seems like that idea was lost for decades.
| q2dg wrote:
| No open source, no fun
| aloisdg wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| >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.
| dmd wrote:
| Well, I suppose that's a philosophy!
| GuinansEyebrows wrote:
| Say what you want about the tenets of Free Software,
| dude. At least it's an ethos.
|
| * this is a movie reference please don't come for me
| 2d8a875f-39a2-4 wrote:
| Clicked expecting some sort of 3d printed rocket-propelled
| grenade launcher.
|
| TFA is not that.
| jamalaramala wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 x 36 (a mid-range multiple) = $360,000
|
| With this amount, the author would have at least 3 years of
| headway, with a much larger open source community.
| Suppafly wrote:
| >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.
| braggerxyz wrote:
| 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.
| crawsome wrote:
| I'm having a very rewarding experience doing this mostly from
| scratch in Gamemaker using Claude.
|
| When I see apps like this, I get the fear that it has those RPG
| maker vibes where all the games will be same-y. That Roblox /
| minecraft kind of lack of uniqueness that makes for a great mod-
| game, but it always harkens back to the same patterns you use in
| the game engine that start to bother gamers like me.
|
| I'm working on a pixel RPG in gamemaker right now, using Claude
| as help, and I've developed a reasonably complex classic pixel
| RPG in less than a few weeks. I still had to constantly correct
| claude, but it was more often 10 steps forward and one step back.
| My whole engine and experience is mostly done, and now it's the
| fun part of designing the world.
|
| I almost have an entire sheet of custom sprites I plan on
| offering as well.
|
| I wouldn't trade my experience for some out of the box thing
| where I don't own a lot of the game's core content.
| Rooster61 wrote:
| Hugged to death, it looks like
| hungryhobbit wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| In a better universe Godot went with Lua instead of GDScript.
| simplify wrote:
| Terrible idea how so? You just said it's a personal project.
| What's the harm in learning and doing what you want? :)
| tbrownaw wrote:
| > _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.
| korse wrote:
| I was expecting a creative solution for shipping rocket propelled
| grenades. I am sorely disappointed.
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