Archipelago

[sawyerfriend]

Are you guys familiar with Archipelago?
It's one of my favourite ways to replay games lately! A decent chunk of indie RPGs are some level of compatible with it as well, including some of my own.

If there's interest, I could probably compile a list of every RPG Maker game that currently has Archipelago support.

[LumiTDog]

I'd be interested in that list for sure
There's a good few games I think would work will in that format but I dont know if anyones made the necessary mods for 'em (assuming its possible in their specific engine version)

[DecentTreatment]

Woah this is sick! I had no idea this was a thing, let alone something compatible with rpgmaker

[sawyerfriend]

Here's a list of every Archipelago compatible game that I recognize as an RPG Maker game, I may have missed some!

-I Hate You, Please Suffer
-Silver Daze (Hey that's me!)
-Laixa: Check The Back (Hey, that's also me!)

...wait, is that it? That's genuinely all I could find, I seriously thought there were more!
Well, with non-RM games we have a few more options you guys might be interested in:

-Crosscode
-Crystal Project
-Deltarune (Up to Ch4)
-Cassette Beasts
-Chained Echoes
-Library of Ruina

So I guess what I've learned here is we need to get more RPG's compatible!
Here's a full list of all known Archipelago compatible games.

As you can see, since Silver Daze is compatible, I do know how to set it up for RPG Maker MV and MZ. If anyone is interested in my assistance, please feel free to hit me up! With the assistance of the Discord user YellowIris, we converted the proprietary Silver Daze Archipelago plugin into a more universally usable one, which you can find here. Of course, it's a lot of work, but I just love Archipelago too much not to strive to see more games compatible. I'm hoping someday I'll have the time to make Axial work as well!

[DecentTreatment]

That list should be bigger tbh. I feel like people just don't know about it or how to use it! Was it relatively simple to set up?

[sawyerfriend]

@DecentTreatment said in Archipelago:

That list should be bigger tbh. I feel like people just don't know about it or how to use it! Was it relatively simple to set up?

Tragically, it was not simple to set up. Potentially the hardest thing I've ever done in RPG Maker, although to be fair a good chunk of that is due to it being RND, as you can see not many people have attempted it so I had to learn on my own.
The original plan was my dedicated programmer would figure it out, but he was completely baffled by it! Not his fault, he's a much better programmer than me but simply doesn't know Archipelago very well. However, I'm glad he gave up on it, since it forced me to hunker down and figure it out myself. It took about two months of dedicated work.

But the good news is that now that I know how it works, the process is much, much easier for future games, and I was able to get a working jam game made in about three days. It remains a lot of effort; no matter how good you are, there's no avoiding needing to register and index every single instance of an item pickup in your game, as well as the surrounding game logic (e.g. you need Surf to enter Cinnabar Island), but that's mostly tedious work as opposed to intellectually difficult, after you figure out how to get it compatible. Now that I've crossed the line, I hope more devs can benefit from all that work!