>>815Continuation of this post.
My thoughts aren't really coherent or ordered or anything so it's a bit of a ramble. RPG Maker itself isn't really taken seriously even in indie circles because almost all games look the same unless you abuse plugins and hacks. Not to mention the awful reputation that RPG Maker acquired for itself with it's ease of use + RTP. Going off on a bit of a tangent here but indie circles themselves have the habit of killing whatever good thing they might have done by spreading chink ripoffs everywhere. The overabundance of pixel art 2D platformers 'round '12 was one of these trends. An older trend and example that almost singlehandedly killed an already small genre populated by mostly indie devs (or rather, doujin devs) and small corps was the danmaku spam late 90's - early 2000's. Most indie shmups's were bullet hells or some kind of DonPachi clone. There was almost no variation for a genre that's already niche as it can be. Touhou was a byproduct of this era that survived the stain of time.
To expand on what
>>820 said, on more underground communities like blogs and the like (you might not know how common blogs are to this day in the jap web, especially for modding / devs), the few RPG Maker I see is usually so dead It doesn't bring much attention, so it's kind of just sitting there. Tumblr isn't that bad as
>>820 said since you can effectively filter out the shit (unfortunately and not surprisingly, there's a lot.) until you come across green pastures. As long as you don't go running your mouth and avoid communicating with a messed up circle consisting of madosexual uboakins chances are you will get the cancer that's much easier to live with.
A surprising thing that I came across is that it's awfully common for eroge and H-game doujin devs to adapt RPG Maker for some reason. I have no idea why this is so (most likely ease of dev) but the majority of them follow the same cliche'd meme: Play a girl, traditional RPG setting, piss easy gameplay, get mado'd if you die or otherwise get "rewarded" with revealing pictures later on the game by winning X or Y or plot developments coming up. The only worthwhile entry in this "genre" would be something like Monster Girl Quest, if only for the curiosity.
A bit tangent-y here but a common trend across RPGMemer devs (way more than devs working on other engines) is how "spiritual successors", "reimaginings" and remakes are so fucking common. Again, this is sort of linked to what I said above but it's pretty bizarre how most devs settle for endlessly improving the one thing they made. I believe it's a matter of comfort zone and sticking with what works but it's pretty widespread compared to other games on other engines. I believe it's because most RPGMaker games, to be worth a damn, need some kind of meaning or purpose (storyline, unique aspect, etc) behind them or they will simply fail. Inserting new/ambitious gameplay mechanics or even perspectives is very hard because of the limitations of the engine so you can't simply make short tech demos (Unity & Unreal is plagued by this) to practice on.
Again, I might resume my ramble later on but I think I exhausted the topic to a reasonable degree.
Have a good day anons.
