Getting Started

meetthemeese
Oct 7, 2020
3 min read

This is the last post before the tutorials begin, I swear! In this post, I will list out a few basic things you'll need before you can start building your own game on the RPG Maker 2000.

So without further ado, let's get right on to it! Right after this irrelevant stock image of a woman getting a facial.

Picture of a woman getting a facial. — But just because it's seemingly irrelevant, doesn't mean it shouldn't exist

RM2K Software

The first step- if you haven't got RM2K on your system yet, get it!

You can still find Don's version on the internet, but if you don't have it already, you can purchase the official translated version off Steam. I'd highly recommend making the purchase as the translations are easy to understand, and there's a very helpful embedded help doc that comes with it (you may need to download an additional utility for Windows from Microsoft's site to view the help document on the newer operating systems; sadly, I don't remember if I needed to do that on my Windows 10 system).

Don Miguel's rip came with an RTP add-on as well, containing ripped and original assets from a whole bunch of different sources. It's a lot of fun using that as it gives us a lot more asset choices than the barebones set that comes with the official RM2K install, but if you purchase the software off steam, yet use the ripped assets, you won't be able to sell your game (what with the assets being illegal to use commercially and all), so just keep that in mind.

The RTP add on can be used with the official steam version too! Whichever version you're using, you need to ensure to install the add-on only after RM2K has been installed, and in the same folder as the RM2K .exe file. The installer will append all the extra files to what already exists in the software's default RTP folders. Alternatively, you can run the installer to a temporary folder on your system, and just copy-paste the ripped assets into your RM2K's RTP folders. There are a whole host of free assets on the internet to use for RM2K, plenty of folks have contributed some original lovely artwork too over the years. There are a couple of websites mentioned in the links post (pinned to the main blog category page) right now, that you can trawl through for free assets. I will keep adding more to the list over time.

Asset Generators

I've found 2 programs that I personally prefer to use for generating characters with minimal effort, or for editing assets.

The first one is really well-known, and is called CharacterMaker 1999. You can use this program to draw your game sprites directly, or to edit existing assets. It's very useful for creating customised graphics for your games.

The second one - a god-sent - is the offline version of the online character set (or charset) generator found at the Charas Project website. It's a community-built tool (yes, that is how dedicated and enthusiastic the community around these gamemakers is) that lets you generate an endless number of characters by using a combination of commonly found graphics parts like hair, faces, eyes, clothes and accessories. They have similar online generators for facesets (the faces you see next to the dialogue texts) and battle character sets (for RM2K3, most likely) too. The website has a lot of user-generated assets and games as well, I highly recommend browsing through this site if you're a beginner.