RPG Maker for multiple platforms + free copy Options

[rgalvao]

I see a few problems with your proposal.

1. (IMO) you are overly ambitious. A game engine that transparently works on Windows, mac, Linux, iOS, Flash, <whatever> is going to be extremely time consuming (if it's even possible, see #2 below).
2. I don't see how you are going to support the iOS feature. I am not an iOS developer, but as far as I know you have to be a licensed developer to publish to the app store. They also have very strict rules about coding standards and design. Additionally, you will need to auto-generate the code (obviously) for the editor to work, yet I highly doubt it will be good enough to pass initial inspection. Even if those two hurdles could be crossed (don't see how), do you have any idea how much time it is going to take to write a generator for 5+ platforms, especially considering you can only do iOS development on a mac? Is your server a mac? It had better be for this to work.
3. Web apps suck for this sort of thing. You need access to the filesystem, advanced UI features, etc. It may all be possible with HTML5, but it's going to be a huge pain in the ass and the quality will suffer. I see no reason why this should be a web app.
4. You are posting this here, essentially asking for design by committee (which never works well...), which tells me that you don't really understand what is needed in a game engine. This is a huge problem. You had better have a firm grasp of the domain before you write even a single line of code.

I could go on, but those are my main grievances.

Thanks BigEd781, your grievances/thoughts made me wake up to a huge mistake I made when talking about the publishing part.

That is the reason I didn't understood all the discussion about multi-platform development. Game multi-platform development is not that hard. If you want to create a game that runs on the internet or on an iphone you will share, at least, 80% of development efforts if you use a tool like Unity (see http://unity3d.com/unity/publishing/). If you plan accordingly and build high level abstractions the right way, I would say you could share at least 95% of development efforts.

But If I build a tool where you choose which platform it will generate binaries to, that involves cross-compilation, and that is, essentially, a hard problem.
I couldn't handle cross-development to different binary/native code. That would skyrocket my budget and I would need to work each binary/native code platform at a time, indeed.

What I thought when talking about publishing was something like this:

1. You use the tool (Let's call it RPG Crafter) to create your game
2. You hit the publish button and it goes to the community's server
3. Your game is listed on community's portal
4. Someone else grabs his iphone/android/pc/mac/web browser and opens the RPG Crafter (client) application. He finds your game and downloads or buys it.

Since I'm already an Apple developer I could build this client application and users wouldn't need a mac, sdks, pay fees to Apple etc to "publish" for iOS. Since I'm using Unity, the same goes to the others platforms.

Sorry to disappoint who was thinking the other way. I should have been more clear about the "publishing" part.

also I am wondering is this going to be an open source project? I would like to contribute to the web section. if it gets off the ground

I really don't know yet. Glad to know there's interest to contribute. If there is a web module it will be written in Google's GWT. See for instance http://www.sencha.com/examples/explorer.html#overview. That was what I used in the second demo (http://dungeoneditor.appspot.com).

R.

This post has been edited by rgalvao: Aug 22 2011, 06:15 PM