Here’s what I’m currently using to build Project Harvest! It’s very interesting
- RPG Maker MV
- OneNote
- Google Sheets
- Google Docs
- Sublime Text
- Adobe Photoshop 2024
- CLIP STUDIO
RPG Maker MV
God. What a hunk. I love this software. It’s got everything you need to build an RPG. There is an active community and years of documentation, experiments, plugins, hopes and dreams attached to it. It has a high floor which means you can jump in and make something genuinely playable fairly quickly. You’re not gonna get the same capabilities out of it like Big Unreal or Unity, so it depends what you wanna do!
I chose this engine because it allows me to express taste without a big upfront investment.
Google Sheets
In this house we enjoy google sheets. It’s a very appealing trait of mine that makes me extra sexy. So for macro planning, I use a backlog. I am in here maybe once a month at most; it’s utilized as a high level expression of status for a given feature, zone, or subject area (ex. art, research). Since I’m the only one that this has to account to, I have liberty to use it as I find valuable and I don’t really need it to be super accurate since it’s view is from so high up – from past experience, if I had stakeholders, this document would probably escalate in usage.
I put anything super important in here that I absolutely must not forget to do!
I also have all enemy data, skills, items, quests, dialog and every day copy paste needs in here. There’s formulas to help plot out curves and formatting that flags anything of note (ex. ‘hey girl this boss does a billion damage if at level 4, is that something we want’).
OneNote
Oh, OneNote. This is my bread and butter. I am in here all the time. I take a large task – ex. creating a level – and break it up into all the required pieces. This is where the micro happens. It’s very fluid and I don’t get overly attached to anything here – if there’s stuff that warrants preservation (lore, how-to, mechanics), I chuck it in my design doc. I like OneNote because I can make nested lists – each plus sign in the screenshots indicate an expand-able list. You can also ‘dock’ it to the side of the screen which is greaaaat
Sublime Text
Idk what it is about sublime text but I find myself able to hash things out better with it. This is my horrible lab where I get very filthy and in the weeds. I need to think things out so I talk to myself a lot. It’s fine I’m wonderful company.
There are approx 80 billion tabs pictured below and don’t worry I use all of them. Shut up
Google Docs
As I’ve gotten older I’ve come to really salivate over a good google doc. I am in here at least once a day. I keep a changelog in here which keeps me sane because I can see every day what I worked on. I also have the benefit of being able to see roughly how long something took by scanning the dates and like-entries – so I know it takes me roughly two months to fully complete a level (writing, events, combat, balancing – everything sans final art), including breaks.
I use this to keep anything evergreen & historical; design documents, lore, feedback, how-to’s, etc. If I’ll be stumped by not knowing something later, it goes in here.
Why do I use FOUR different softwares when I could use less? That’s how my brain works!!!! shh
Adobe Photoshop & CLIP STUDIO
At this stage in the project I’m adamant on not making any sort of final art but sometimes the imagination needs help. So I’m happy to invest small chunks of time into making placeholder graphics where it feels important (ex. tutorials). PS is my go to for that!
I use CLIP STUDIO for painting – at this point it’s for practice and plopping out some image in my head.
Thanks for reading!!