from Hacker News

RPG in a Box

by skibz on 5/10/25, 8:52 AM with 77 comments

  • by chrismorgan on 5/14/25, 7:06 AM

    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>.)

  • by thomasfl on 5/14/25, 8:17 AM

    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.

  • by freetime2 on 5/14/25, 6:51 AM

    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

  • by Buttons840 on 5/14/25, 4:24 AM

  • by dang on 5/14/25, 4:47 AM

    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)

  • by hungryhobbit on 5/14/25, 4:21 PM

    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.

  • by 90s_dev on 5/14/25, 4:32 AM

    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!

  • by jamalaramala on 5/14/25, 8:45 AM

    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.

  • by the_real_cher on 5/14/25, 8:11 AM

    This is not a rocket propelled grenade startup

  • by braggerxyz on 5/14/25, 8:57 AM

    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.

  • by q2dg on 5/14/25, 8:35 AM

    No open source, no fun

  • by khazhoux on 5/14/25, 8:29 AM

    I’m very happy that there are modern equivalents to Adventure Construction Set! Seems like that idea was lost for decades.

  • by qmr on 5/14/25, 6:38 AM

    I wonder how it compares to RPGMaker.

  • by southernplaces7 on 5/15/25, 4:43 PM

    Here I was thinking they were going to talk about rocket propelled grenades in a box.

  • by Rooster61 on 5/14/25, 2:00 PM

    Hugged to death, it looks like

  • by goodboyjojo on 5/15/25, 9:48 AM

    i bought this software on steam awhile ago. i had fun messing around with it

  • by korse on 5/14/25, 7:56 PM

    I was expecting a creative solution for shipping rocket propelled grenades. I am sorely disappointed.

  • by matt3210 on 5/14/25, 7:37 AM

    Uh is this a AI thing?

  • by 2d8a875f-39a2-4 on 5/14/25, 8:37 AM

    Clicked expecting some sort of 3d printed rocket-propelled grenade launcher.

    TFA is not that.

  • by deafpolygon on 5/14/25, 5:46 AM

    They should take advantage of viral marketing: "I heard you like game engines, so here's a game engine in a game engine."

  • by crawsome on 5/14/25, 1:21 PM

    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.