My potential future in game design

Later on last month I recently acquired RPG Maker XP on sale on Steam for about $7. I have taken a fairly good look at the program and it certainly does have plenty of potential for sure when it comes to game design in general. But I do like the fact that it is possible to add in Voice Acting audio clips in which I can attest to that personally. You might be thinking "That's nice, but what about the games themselves?" and I certainly do understand that. Do I have any game ideas? Sure! I can think of several however many of them are Fan Game ideas (and many of them include Multi-Crossovers but that is another story). What can I say, I've been a Fan Work creator for over 20+ years now it is in my very nature. But one potential problem there is how I would handle the character sprites? Sure the character portraits and enemies in battle I can always get pics for easily but finding character sprites might be a trickier prospect. Sure there are folks whom have made sprite-sets for characters for use in RPG Maker but those seem to be generally for known RPG franchises like Final Fantasy and the like. However this may not necessarily have to be a problem, when I do a Casting Call for Voice Actors for a RPG Maker project I can always add in a CC for Sprite Designers at the Casting Call Club.

Now you might be thinking "well what about an Original story then"? I am actually considering that, a few years ago I did actually consider doing an original RPG story idea for RPG Maker for the Playstation 1 a few years ago. I even had a basic story in mind and all the playable characters and a main and prominent secondary cast in mind. Though I admit I never actually got started on the story in the game felt a bit uncertain about it. Namely how big created games for RPG Maker for the PS1 can be without requiring plenty of memory cards and I never got one of those Dex Drives where one can play other people's creations. However while my current lap top may not be the best but I have a pretty good feeling that how much space I have is a considerably less pressing issue. What is this Original RPG Story idea you ask? Well I will tell you... in a future Journal that is. However one thing I do realize is that regardless if its original or fan not all game story ideas would fit RPG Maker. I am also thinking of going into making Visual Novels. First of all I'm not thinking about those pseudo Visual Novel/Sprite Comic ones I did for my Crazy Plot Twist Theater series here at...

However one little issue on the matter is cost. I have taken a look at the Visual Novel programs at Steam but a lot of them seem to be rather a bit too costly like about $60 or so. I did find a "Free to play" Visual Novel Maker in Steam though but it is early access and not all the features are available yet so I didn't bother. However I have noticed that outside of Steam there are free Visual Novel Makers such as Ren'Py, Novelty & CloudNovel so I will look into seeing which one of these I would be using. There is also one other option to consider is the program known as OpenBOR, which is from the known fangame Beats of Rage. What is it you ask? It is in a way M.U.G.E.N for brawler games but it can also be used for Adventure games and Action RPGs and the like. (Oh yes and if anyone asks I did try to dabble into M.U.G.E.N years ago but I wasn't sure how to figure out how to fully use it at the time but I may reconsider it in the future.) I have heard that you can put voice clips in cinematic scenes in your games. But I also figured that unlike RPG Maker I may not have necessarily need to ask folks to make new character sprites for me (though I could be wrong).

One last thing is to consider is that whether it be RPG Maker Game or Visual Novel game is if its an original story I can potentially sell it for profit at sites like Steam. However one problem is that I would of course need to pay folks like voice talent and the like and I'm really not sure I could afford that even if I keep the voice clips to a minimum. Sure I could just go with no voice clips (or a few by myself) and do all the work myself. But by that rate I would kind of have to keep my game prices rather low. So I could potentially explore this idea but it would highly be for the best that I wait until I am in a better financial position in life (assuming that I can). Still I am definitely thinking of trying to do something on RPG Maker XP in the future and I am also considering other options such as Visual Novels and OpenBOR. So what do you folks think?