RPG Developer Bakin Editor Early Access Review

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Introduction RPG Developer Bakin is the "new" RPG Maker-esque engine on the block. I say "new" because it's actually created SmileBoom, who made Smile Game Builder, another RPG Maker-esque engine. They're no strangers to what an RPG needs and it shows with Bakin. However, the question is, does Bakin do what RPG Maker MZ does better or is there some work to be done? Now that Early Access is out for Bakin, let's take a look at what Bakin has to offer. Keep in mind that since this is Earth Access, it means that not everything is finalized and that's potentially more to come. This is an article written by Yanfly. Creating a New Project Welcome Page When creating a new project, we're greeted with this screen. By answering the questions asked of the guide, it helps kickstart your game dev experience. This can become potentially tedious but overall, I like it when using the program casually. Project Basics Here, we enter the game's title, subtitle, and the name of the creator. Sadly, there's a limit of 18 characters each. This may or may not be a problem for some games, but I know for certain languages (ie. German), this can become a big issue. For other languages like Japanese or Chinese, this is a very small issue. Asset Amount Here, we decide if we want to use assets provided by Bakin or just leave it empty. For those coming from RPG Maker, this is where you decide if you want the RTP (Runtime Package) aka default assets. This can be a time saver for those who want to create a minimalist project or a project with completely unique assets and don't want to waste time having to remove everything. Player Settings RPG Developer Bakin is interesting in how it handles the player character. In RPG Maker, the player character is determined by the first character in the player's party. In Bakin, it's a separate entity. This can be either a blessing or a curse. It can be a blessing for those who wish for more autonomy with a "leader but not fighter" type of playstyle (akin to Pokémon). Or it can be a curse for those who swap out their party members constantly (akin to Octopath Traveler). Characters in Bakin can be either 3D models that turn as the camera moves or 2D stamps that will always appear flat on the screen to the player's camera angle. Camera Settings This is where things get interesting. You get to choose your camera angle that's best fit for your game. There are four of them and they can all make for some very interesting gameplay decisions. The "Player Central" view is the classic camera angle you see with games like Final Fantasy 7. The "Player Rear View" works best with games that put emphasis on seeing the environment like most Western RPG's. The "First-Person View" works well with dungeon crawlers like Etrian Odyssey. The "Side View" is for RPG platformers like MapleStory. Having the ability to pick and choose from these is absolutely fantastic in my opinion. Controls Settings The Operation Method determines how controls are handled. Top View Operation is classic press left to move left, press down to move down. A lot of JRPG's use this. Tank Controls is where it gets interesting. Press left/right to turn the player and up/down to move forward or backward. This is the control scheme for some classic games like Resident Evil or FPS games. Side View Operation lets the player travel in a plane horizontally akin to a platformer. I think giving these control schemes to the player is great and opens up a lot of game genre possibilities. Action Settings You're seeing it right! The ability to jump and run with inertia is innate with Bakin and doesn't require external plugins like RPG Maker! Huzzah! However, keep in mind it's very basic though. Jumping will launch the player a set height and you cannot adjust the height based on how long you hold the jump button. Think of it like jumping Disgaea's base or the awkward jump height and arm flailing like in Minecraft. Inertia feels kinda weird imo and is best left off unless you're planning on doing an action game. Going up a minimally slanted cliff kills your momentum more than a speed bump near an elementary school zone. I think both of these features can use some tweaking. Last Page And finally, the last page before going to edit your game. You can decide to test out the camera and control scheme for your game here. It's a high quality of life feature that makes me glad the Bakin developers added in because there are 12 different camera and control schemes you can use. Doing a test play here won't give me much to talk about as it's just an empty map so let's start editing the game. Score Rating for Create New Project I think Bakin almost nails it with asking the right questions to create a new game project. RPG Maker can learn a few things from Bakin in regards to this such as not having to load a new project full of assets, different control schemes for different types of games (because let's be real, not everybody uses RPG Maker to make RPG's), and the like. If I were to give this a point score from 0 to 10, it'd get a 7. The reason why it doesn't get full points is because somethings don't sit well with me. Things like the 18 character limit for titles, subtitles, and creator names. Things like setting up a separate sprite for the player character. The jump and inertia settings are too basic and require tweaking, too. Improvements that can be done would be to remove the 18 character limit. Give the game developer an option to decide if they want to separate the hero and player sprites or to tie them together. Also make jumping and inertia feel better. Get those right and I'd give it a perfect score. Score: 7/10 Map Editor Initial Look Immediately, we're taking to the map editor. Makes sense. It's where RPG Maker takes you too after creating a new project. And quite frankly, it's the easiest place to start. Map List The "Map List" tab allows you to add maps and map folders. Yes, you heard that correctly. You can now create map folders and dump those maps into said folders for better organization. This is a feature that RPG Maker desperately needs so that we don't have to create empty maps to function as pseudo-folders. Now this is where I have some issues: The "Map List" button tab is hidden away quite well with a vertical context bar. I'm not sure what the design decisions are behind this, but it's incredibly easy for a newcomer to miss. I don't understand why they couldn't just add "Map List", "Placed List", and "Common Events" to the Master Menu selection to the left. It's not like they are lacking in room there. Also, the buttons to close the tab are confusing, too. The pin button will send it back to the tab while the X button will erase it completely from the vertical tab. To get the erased tab back, you have to go the View context menu and bring back "Map List". It's a very awkward way of handling the window. Context Menu Why is the shortcut key for cut the T button when it's always been the X button? Paste being P instead of V??? Unforgiveable! Literally unusable! Placed List The "Placed List" is also on that awkward vertical tab. Here you can view the structure objects and events you've placed on the map. It's very similar to RPG Maker MZ's Event tab listing, except RPG Maker MZ's event tab does a poor job of actually giving you control of the event on the map. With RPG Maker MZ, you can select the event but you can't delete it from the list, you can't cut/copy it from the list, nor can you center the editor on the event from the list to view it properly. Bakin lets you do that with ease and even lets you convert structure objects to events. However, I still have to dock points for the awkward placement of the "Placed List" as it can be hard to find. Common Events Common Events are handled on the map editor, too, which kind of strikes me as odd since there are also "Battle Events" on there. Yep, that's right. There are now Common Events and Battle Events. The Battle Events function similar to my Base Troop Events where there are global battle events for every battle. This is a great addition and something that RPG Maker needs to consider. Common Events function the way they do with RPG Maker and I suppose that should be no surprise. However, both Battle Events and Common Events have a new bonus to them and that'll be something I'll cover later in the Events section. Unfortunately, just like "Map List" and "Placed List", the awkward placement to access the "Common Events" tab leaves much to be desired. I said it before, I'll say it again. It needs to go the list on the left where it's easy to see. Hopefully, that'll change once Bakin is out of Early Access. Terrain Stamps Terrain editing is quite easy to do. You just pick a texture and paint the texture onto the map. This can be done via brush or paint bucket, just like RPG Maker MZ. You can raise or lower the level of the terrain or turn them into slopes or stairs. In regards to slopes and stairs, it's not really obvious how to use them from the get go. Slopes and stairs can only be applies to already raised terrain. I'm still unsure of how to create diagonal cliffs and I think you can't. Object Stamps Under the "Stamps" tab on the right side of the map editor, we have the "Objects" tab where we can place things like buildings, particle effects, trees, plants, rocks, roads, stairs, furniture, and even character sprites that don't do anything event-like. This is basically what RPG Maker MZ uses its tileset for from ABCDE. The big difference being that RPG Maker doesn't have particles for you to place down nor can you put down event-free sprites. You gotta either event those particles or just make zero function events for the roaming sprites. The tab here works great. Event Stamps On the "Events" tab, you can select from a template list of events to add. This is essentially a section of "Quick Events" from RPG Maker that are found for a variety of uses. You can later convert these templates to fully customizable events, too. I think the template selection is large and fantastic. It covers a huge range of things from adding characters to the party to speaking with NPC's to touch encounters. You can create a quick shop or inn with it, too. There are also traveling merchant templates. Treasure chests, finding items in dressers, beds to rest on, inspecting graves. There are even pushable event blocks. The biggest thing in my opinion are the more dungeon-esque event templates. There are basic things like stairs, doors that send you to another map, warp gates, etc. But on top of that, there are more interesting mechanics like giant switches you can step on to open specific types of doors. For example, there's a blue switch event. It opens the blue door event which was locked before. While for the RPG Maker veteran, eventing things like these are super simple to do. However, for a new developer, such tasks may be daunting. Bakin simplifies this process and eases new developers into creating more complex gameplay. RPG Maker can definitely learn a lot from this. Map Settings I honestly did not know this tab existed until I was told it by some friends. It was so incredibly easy to miss. On the far right of the screen, there is a "Map Settings" tab, which if you push, opens up this little bit. It's located on an awkward vertical slab just like "Map List", "Placed List", and "Common Events". Here, you adjust the name of the map and other settings like size, bgm, weather (aka Environmental Effects), and if the map should be pre-loaded. You can even call some events before fully loading the map, too. Oh, and for those asking, the max map size is 256x256x256. When a map is too big, it'll be cached in chunks, or as Bakin calls it, clusters. The other tabs let you adjust things like the sky's color, skybox model, light source, and other post processing effects like bloom, exposure, contrast. You can choose to have battles appear as random encounters or random touch event spawns. Enforcing specific camera angles is also done through here. Vertical Tool List The toolbar is what you expect. Selection variants, drawing, bucket, terrain up/down, positioning, rotation, and adding light sources. Not much is different here from RPG Maker MZ aside from the specific 3D management tools which obviously wouldn't be in RPG Maker. However, there are some things that don't make much sense to me like a lack of randomize angle thing. This adds a tedious nature to having to manually select each plant object and adjust their rotation one by one. Hopefully, this aspect gets changed later on. Bottom Settings These are found at the bottom of the screen. The buttons here alter how the map editor in the center of the screen works, ranging from filtering the selection type to terrain or objects or both, how movement works when doing drag/drop, angle manipulation, snap to grid, showing the grid, and toggling different camera perspectives. The odd one out though is handling regions here. Which I personally think is better off as a separate tab similar to how RPG Maker does it. The region handling is very bulky which can make it odd to use for those who aren't used to it. I do think that the buttons could be a bit more vivid as they're still pretty easy to miss. Score Rating for Map Editor Bakin has a good map editor with lots of potential. I think the strongest points are the object placement tools and event templates. Otherwise, everything else is very standard according to what you'd expect with a 3D map editor. However, most of it is stunted by some awkward UI decisions like those weird black vertical tabs which can be very easy to miss. "Map List", "Placed List", "Common Events", "Map Settings" could all have easily fit in the "Master Menu" on the left side of the screen and there would still be room left over. Yet, the UI decides to make them harder to see. The functions at the bottom of the screen also need to be more visible as they're very easy to miss. There are definitely some missing tools that would add some quality of life aspects, such as the randomize angle tool. If there is a way to make diagonal or rounded cliffs, it's not obvious either and it'd be a great way to get rid of the overly blocky look. Regions also being awkward and bulky to manage isn't ideal either. They're not as simple as RPG Maker's ability to just mark certain tiles as regions. But as this is early access, things can definitely change for the better. Score: 7/10 Resource Manager Terrains For the Resource Manager, I'll be judging both the resource manager UI and the assets that come with Bakin. The terrain textures come in two types: 128 resolution and 64 resolution. Without having to guess, the 128 resolution looks better. 64 resolution can look better for more pixel-esque games though. I think the terrain texture blocks look great. The textures that come with them are finely made. They're not ultra pixelated like with Minecraft blocks that everybody seems to say and associate voxels with. Some of the terrain textures even have a shine to it like ice blocks. Magma blocks are also animated. Poison terrain also has liquidation effects. I do think the water textures could be a bit better made, but I wouldn't hesitate to use them regardless. 3D Stamps 3D stamps come in a bunch of varieties: Basic Set Models Motions Physics Settings Particles Materials Textures The basic set contains "particle effects" which range from raining effects to fire effects to thunderbolts. It also has "natural" models like plants, trees, rocks. "Outdoor" models like background objects, buildings, building parts, stairs, and roads. "Indoor" models for furniture, small goods, kitchen, food, and ruins. The objects that come with Bakin are the full package. There's a bit of everything ranging from different types of chairs to window types to huge varieties of trees. While the models aren't highly detailed, they aren't half-assed either. The quality is something you would expect from the B Team of an AAA company and that's not a bad thing at all. The "Models" section allows you to adjust the textures used for the material and the material texture type. This allows for things like different lighting reflections to luster quality. "Motions" control inherent animations for certain models like buildings with doors or just plain ol' door frames. "Physics Settings" control collision hitboxes and where things can be interacted with via event. For "Particles", which use Effekseer by the way, you can add sound effects, environmental effects, shaders, screen shaking and more. In a sense, these are the "battle animations" for RPG Maker. However, it's not just limited for battle use. Particles are also used for weather effects like rain, snow, storms, lighting, confetti, fireworks, wind. Some are even used for environmental effects like poisonous gas, magma, fairy light orbs, waterfalls, mist. On, and the one thing every RPG Maker mapper loves: Godrays. Yes, godrays are here, too, as particle effects. Not only that, the particle effects look GOOD! They're very high quality in comparison to what RPG Maker MZ's battle animations have. Here, let's compare RPG Maker MZ's earth spell to Bakin's: Below is RPG Maker MZ's Earth spell: Below is Bakin's Earth spell: MZ's Earth spell just puts monotone brown splatter marks on the screen while Bakin summons entire mountains with earthquakes and explosions. Comparing these two just isn't even fair. It's like comparing a microwaved burger with a fancy Michelin restaurant's best steak. RPG Maker MZ most likely gave us low tier assets to help sell the DLC packs from their store, but come on, don't make it that ugly. Have some pride. "Materials" and "Textures" are staples for 3D modeling These are basically "skins" or "flat images" depending on the model and use. From what I can tell, these are rather high quality. Also, these icons? They look so crisp and clean! It's easy to tell what they are! They're just miles above RPG Maker MV and MZ's icons. MZ's default icons look like hot garbage from a mobile device sent through a deep-fried meme image generator. The other nice thing about Bakin's icons is that you can have multiple icon sheets! This gets rid of the icon sheet management nightmare that happens whenever your icons grow past a certain quantity. It's also a lot easier for new developers who aren't familiar with image editing to add new icons, too. Great move by Bakin. 2D Stamps Sounds Movies System Resources Score Rating for Resources Database Game Definition UI Layout Tool Camera Tool Variable Labels Sprite Tool Expanded Features Conclusion