ACTION GAME MAKER News

Hello everyone! ACTION GAME MAKER producer Morino here!

We hope you’ve all been enjoying the RPG Maker Festival 2025 event and our recent announcement! We’re super excited to be bringing ACTION GAME MAKER to you this June 16 (PDT)!

So even though we’ve had several of these letters so far, we think it’s important to take this opportunity to shed some more light on our current development status.

[h2]Development Status[/h2]
Currently, we are nearing function complete.
The missing functions are primarily around some options, additional actions for save/load operations, database control, and game build functions. Pretty much the rest is there, and it’s all about polishing things up into their final status.
Of course, function complete doesn’t mean those implemented functions are ready for release! We’ve still got plenty of verification and debug testing before we can say things are done.

Let’s look at some screens to give you a better understanding!
First up is the main Scene view, where you’ll make your level maps and place Objects.

This main view is primarily a Godot screen.
We understand that there’s a lot of information to place in front of users and that it takes time to get used to it. But generally speaking there’s a lot less window/function switching now, so it should be a lot more efficient to use than Pixel Game Maker MV.
The left panel is the Scene panel, and it gives quick access to Objects and the layer structure.
The bottom left panel is the file browser for quick access to resources/assets you have added to your project.
The right hand panel is the Inspector, that provides access to detailed settings for whatever scene, Object, or other item selected from the Scene panel.
Let’s move on to the Object screen next.

The UI doesn’t change much, as it uses the same basic layout as the Scene menu.
The important information for Objects, as well as their settings, are contained within Godot’s Node structures. As examples, the CollisionShap2D node contains collision information (wall detection), and the BaseSettings node contains the basic Action Game Maker-provided settings.

You can differentiate Godot’s nodes from ACTION GAME MAKER nodes by looking at the icon color. ACTION GAME MAKER nodes are all colored blue and orange!
The visual scripting systen primarily relies on these custom nodes, and they contain the many of the same information and settings as was provided by Pixel Game Maker MV.

Let us remind you that you will have full access to Godot’s 2D nodes, such as Light2D for lights and Label for displaying textures. Through this combination of Nodes, Objects can be highly customized to provide whatever your game needs.

Next let’s take a look at the visual scripting interface!

Again, you can see that the base UI doesn’t change much compared to the other screens.
The rectangles you see are the action boxes, and the lines are the conditions that control movement between the action boxes.
Each action box contains a list of actions that will processed when that box is accessed. These actions are assigned using a special inspector window similar to RPG Maker’s event command system. Connecting the boxes with link conditions will create your program flow.
Please note that flow is now strictly left to right, and the free form structure of Pixel Game Maker MV is no longer possible. While some people might feel strongly about this, we hope you will understand that this tradeoff comes with many new improvements and that you will agree that it is a much improved system in total.

Here are some of the improvements that this new system has enabled over Pixel Game Maker MV:
[h3]You can now drag to select multiple boxes and move them as a group.[/h3]

[h3]It is now possible to copy and paste all selected boxes.[/h3]

These are just a few examples of a how we are improving the visual scripting to be easier than ever to work with!
The current intended flow for producing a game in ACTION GAME MAKER is

1. Create the Objects needed.
   
2. Implement the logic for your Object using the visual scripting system.
   
3. Place the Object into a Scene.
   

...and repeat as needed!

That generally covers where we are with ACTION GAME MAKER’s development status, so let me give you some information about the closed beta test.
[h2]Beta Test - It starts today![/h2]
It’s a bit sudden, but from today (February 13), a few select creators have been given access to ACTION GAME MAKER in order to participate in a closed beta test.

Currently, only a very small number of creators have been invited to participate. This is due to the fact that documentation is incomplete at this time, and we are only able to provide support for a handful of users at this time. We will consider expanding the test program to more users if things progress well. We selected the current testers fully internally using criteria we do not plan to share publicly, so your understanding on this matter is appreciated.

The goals of this test are to gather data for the improvement of ACTION GAME MAKER, fix bugs, and hopefully have testers become evangelists!

Testers will generally be able to post about ACTION GAME MAKER on social media, Discord, Youtube, or other platforms, including sharing of the beta UI.

We hope that these testers will be able to provide more details about ACTION GAME MAKER than we are able to provide in these Producer Letters!

However, we do ask that you act as follows when talking to the testers:

1. That they are being asked to test software that is still under active development and is not complete. Many things could change between now and the release date.
   
2. The testers are all volunteers who have agreed to help make ACTION GAME MAKER a better experience. Please do not harass them for information they do not posses or do not have access to. Be nice to them and let’s keep the communication pleasant!
   

We appreciate your cooperation with these points.

And that’s all for this letter.
The next letter will be in March.
We are looking forward to seeing you again next month!

[h2]The release date for ACTION GAME MAKER has been set for Monday, June 16![/h2]
And a new PV with scenes actually created using ACTION GAME MAKER has been released!
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Only 4 months left until the release, and we will continue to release further information on the ACTION GAME MAKER Steam News.
Let's add to your wish list!

Hello again, everyone! ACTION GAME MAKER producer Morino here!

We’re well into the new year now, and it’s now the year in which ACTION GAME MAKER will be released!
For this seventh producer letter – and first of the year – I’d like to discuss the big changes to we’ve made to lighting and shadows over Pixel Game Maker MV.

Last year, we post this short video to our social media, and it was made fully in ACTION GAME MAKER and is all gameplay!

So let’s take a look into how it was made.
ACTION GAME MAKER supports PointLight2D and DirectionalLight2D system from Godot for use with 2D scenes.

I’ll explain both in a bit more detail as follows!

[h3]PointLight2D[/h3]
PointLight2Ds are a small light designed to be used for things like torches, room lights, and other such limited forms of area lighting. The Holiday project used them for things like the light from inside the igloo and the S in Holidays.
Attributes light strength, size, and color are configurable, and they can also be controlled via our visual scripting system or in animations. So it should be possible to create a lot of dynamic lighting effects!

Additionally, you can texture them and thus create all kinds of appearances: from basic round lights to flashlights, or even laser like effects as possible.

Using a combination of different settings, we created this particular laser-like effect you see below. However, lighting does have an impact on performance that is quite heavy, so keep that in mind when designing the look of your game! If performance is still a concern for your game, remember that classic tricks like using masks, specially prepared tiles. or having shaded and lit versions of sprites can be used without the impact of using dynamic lighting and are still perfectly valid options.

[h3]Light & Shadow[/h3]
As most of you probably noticed, in addition to generating light, objects that enter the light will also cast dynamically generated shadows. With ACTION GAME MAKER, now all objects and tiles placed via the auto-tile function can also have an Occluder volume assigned. This volume is the same size of the collision box by default. This is what is used to calculate the shadow when the object is under a light, and no additional settings are required to see those shadows. However, this is a performance cost, so keep that in mind when performing optimization of your game – or if you simply need to stop an object from casting a shadow for other reasons!

[h3]DirectionalLight2D[/h3]
DirectionalLight2D-type lights are used for things like sunlight that affect a whole scene. They’re very powerful, and can distort the whole scene if made too bright. This means these lights will affect color perception of the scene.
For example, using a red light can help create a twilight feel, while a blue-white light evokes a sense of a moonlit night.


And again, these lights can be controlled via visual script or animations, with all the expressiveness that this enables. This makes dynamic time of day changes with a single tileset a reality.

Lighting is just one of many advanced functions that ACTION GAME MAKER incorporates from Godot. Between lighting, shaders, and particles, it is possible to make more expressive game worlds that reflect the beauty and aesthetics of the world you want to build! Here’s our forest sample with red fog and some ember-like particles.

Now our forest has a much more hellish feel to it! This might be a bit overkill (we’ll need to check performance), but it really shows what is possible!

We hope you can understand now how much more expressive ACTION GAME MAKER will allow you to be over our previous tool! With that said, even if you struggle with understanding the visual differences, we hope your takeaway from this letter is that it’s possible to make visually powerful and interesting games.

And that’s all for this producer letter! As usual, our next letter will be in February. With RPG Maker Festival 2025 also being in February, perhaps we should release some additional information for ACTION GAME MAKER too...

See you all next month!

Hello again, everyone! ACTION GAME MAKER producer Morino here!

We’ve received a lot of comments leading up to this 6th letter, and I’d like to thank you all! Some of the comments have been asking about how to get ready for the launch and what kind of assets ACTION GAME MAKER will support. So today we’ll go over what kind of assets and resources are supported!

Visual, audio, and video assets all have different formats, and so we’ll cover the default formats available out of the box as well as details about the assets included with purchase. So let’s get started!

[h2]General Information[/h2]
[h3]Supported Resolutions[/h3]
As in PGMMV, ACTION GAME MAKER supports custom resolution input, so you can make small resolution or full 4K projects if desired! But the default included assets are designed for a 960x540 image scaled to a 1920x1080 output resolution.

[h3]Supported Image Formats[/h3]
BMP/PNG/JPEG/SVG/WebP are all supported by default, so you shouldn’t have any issues getting your image into ACTION GAME MAKER.
The default assets are primarily provided in PNG for ease of use and easy editing.
When creating your own original assets for an ACTION GAME MAKER project, we suggest using SVG or WebP formats due to their compression ratio and support of transparency data.

[h3]Objects[/h3]
Godot treats Objects using the scene format. Each scene is saved as a .tscn file. This makes it very easy to export or import Objects. This is because animation, scripting, and other node settings are all saved within the scene file. However, this could be subject to change in future versions, as image and sound resources are not included and have a fixed path. You would need to manually add this missing information to the exported or imported data.

[h3]Scripting[/h3]
ACTION GAME MAKER does allow the use of GDScript in addition to our custom visual scripting system, and you can use both freely within a single project. C# support is not available at this time.

[h3]Regarding Plugins[/h3]
Any plugin that is designed to work with default Godot is expected to work with ACTION GAME MAKER.
As ACTION GAME MAKER’s additional functions are closed source, any plug-in or function changes that require a recompile of Godot are not supported for use with ACTION GAME MAKER.
However, any plugin that can be used with the official build of Godot should work with ACTION GAME MAKER.
Indeed, while there may be some compatibility testing to ensure that there are conflicts with ACTION GAME MAKER’s changes, all Godot 4.3 plugins for the 2D pipeline are expected to work. More information about Godot’s plugin system can be found here:
https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/plugins/editor/installing_plugins.html

[h2]Graphics[/h2]
[h3]Tiles[/h3]
The included tileset are 24x24 tiles designed to be used with Godot’s TileMapLayer Node:
https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/2d/using_tilemaps.html
TileMapLayer has no size limits, so sizes like 8x8 or 48x48 are supported, but you’re free to use unusual sizes like rectangular 16x64 tiles or whatever your project needs.
Additionally, if you separate them into layers it is possible to mix tile sizes (resolutions) in a single scene. So it’s more than possible to use both 24x24 tiles and 48x48 tiles simultaneously! In addition, thanks to the power of Godot, ACTION GAME MAKER supports the following tile layouts:
Isometric

Half-Offset Square

Hexagon


[h3]Autotile[/h3]
ACTION GAME MAKER uses Godot’s Terrain and terrain tileset functionality. Typically, using terrain tiles requires manual configuration of tile connections (Peering Bits) and collision shapes for each tile. However, ACTION GAME MAKER can auto-configure Peering and collisions as long as the tile image matches our template structure.

The portions of the tile connected by the red lines represent the connections checked when determining tile placement. Users are able to paint these lines to configure the tile Peering, and this is how the autotile function determines if a tile should be changed when placing tiles into your game world. Note that if a peering extends to the edge of the tile it can connect to any other tile with a matching peering, so please be careful when configuring your tileset and tile peering.

Note that the above image is only an illustration with Peering Bit display enabled. The actual tiles look like the image below. For this sample, we used 24x24 pixel tiles, but other tile sizes will be supported.


[h3]Characters[/h3]
The included character and enemy assets are designed for use with 2D bone animations. You can learn about Godot’s 2D bone animation system here:
https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/animation/2d_skeletons.html
More than 30 animations, including the skeleton data, is included, so the animations can be quickly customized by changing the texture (sprite) data.


[h3]Texture Formatting[/h3]
The default character uses a 240x144 PNG formatted image. The character ends up being sized 24x32 after compositing.
Below is a sample of the included characters. Simply replacing the sprite inside the texture file with your own customized version is enough to get started with making an original character!

[h3]Animation Data[/h3]
All included animation data can be customized or appended to with your own creations. The male character includes a lot of weapon-based melee attacks, while the female character has more of a focus on movement and special abilities. Both are designed for use in Metroivania-style games.

The animation data is stored in the Godot tres format. This means that they can be exported or imported into other projects as desired. Just make sure you use the same bone structure to ensure compatibility. Note that the male and female characters do have differences in their bone structures, so the animations are not directly compatible.

In addition to bone animations, sprite-based animations are also supported. In ACTION GAME MAKER, you will need to create the sprite animations using Godot’s Animation Player, as the “AnimatedSprite2D” node is not supported. Please see this Godot documentation for information about the Animation Player:
https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/2d/2d_sprite_animation.html#sprite-sheet-with-animationplayer

[h3]Character Images[/h3]
Character busts included with ACTION GAME MAKER are sized at 1080x1080, and full body images are sized at 1272x2000.
Base, happy, anger, sadness, surprise, and fear expressions are included!
Note that due to the large size these images are in the WebP format.

[h3]Backgrounds/Environment[/h3]
In order to enable large amounts of scrolling, images designed to be used with Godot’s Parallax2D function are included. You can learn about 2D parallax here:
https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/2d/2d_parallax.html
Included are 2 backgrounds: a sky-heavy outdoor environment and a skyless cave environment, with multiple layers.
For very distant use in the most background layer, the outdoor image is 720x1152, and the interior image ix 720x576.
For middle distance backgrounds, such as mountains, both the interior and outdoor images are 720x576.
For backgrounds nearest to the player, such as ones that include the ground, the outdoor version is 720x1152, and the interior version is 720x1728.


[h2]Audio[/h2]
[h3]BGM/SE[/h3]
The included assets are all in the Ogg format. While WAV, Ogg, and MP3 are all supported formats, Ogg was chosen due to the reasonable file size and ease of looping provided by the format. While the default Ogg metadata (LOOPSTART, etc.) are not supported, it is still possible to create specific loops manually using offsets.
Please check the Godot documentation for more information about supported audio formats:
https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/assets_pipeline/importing_audio_samples.html#supported-audio-formats

[h3]Video[/h3]
The only video format supported by ACTION GAME MAKER is Ogv (Ogg Theora). H.264 and H.265 codec videos, while a popular format, are not currently supported by Godot due to Godot’s structure as an open source engine. Some additional information can be found in the Godot documentation:
https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/animation/playing_videos.html

And that’s all there is to know about the default assets included with ACTION GAME MAKER! While we tried to keep it simple today, I think this gives you an idea of how versatile we’ll be thanks to the power of Godot! While the included assets focus on a pixel-style side view action game, it should be possible to create a variety of games using these assets, especially if you start creating your own assets. And that was our goal for today: to give future ACTION GAME MAKER developers information needed to get started on getting assets prepared!

That’s all for today! Unfortunately we’re not quite ready to share the release date, but I can tell you that we’re still working hard during this holiday season. Our next letter will be in January, so I hope everyone is able to enjoy the holidays while they wait!
Have a Happy New Year!

Hello everyone, ACTION GAME MAKER Producer Morino here!
In this fifth Producer’s Letter, I think it’s time to cover animation!

ACTION GAME MAKER uses similar logic to how Pixel Game Maker MV used animation, in that each action can be assigned an animation.

However, in the older tool you either used our custom animation function or imported a sspj file created with OPTPiX SpriteStudio. But with the new engine, all animations go through Godot’s Animation Player functionality.

[h2]Overview of Godot’s Animation Player[/h2]
Godot’s Animation Player is based on a modern Timeline format using Tracks.


Anyone who has used a video editing program should be familiar with this system. Bezier curves and easing as supported, and creating rich animations without the use of another tool should be possible.


This applies both to sprite-based animations and bone-based animations. All animations we have shown so far are all made using the Animation Player’s bone system without use of an external tool.

Additionally, Godot Nodes can be placed into the Animation Player as an additional track to make changes to Node properties during the animation.

This means that position and rotation information, scale, color information, and many other elements can be updated directly within the animation structure.

So, what does this enable for users of ACTION GAME MAKER?

[h2]Improvements over Pixel Game Maker MV: What was difficult is now possible![/h2]
[h3]Animated Cutscenes[/h3]
In PGMMV you needed to script up a complex sequence of events in order to create an in-game cutscene. With the power of Godot’s Animation Player, creating in-game cutscenes with lots of animation should be a much less complex task.

[h3]Mid-animation Particle Effects[/h3]
Particles are represented by a single Node in Godot, so simply adding the particle effect Node to the Timeline as a Track and then assigning the start time is super simple, and makes it much easier to accurately time the effect start and stop time compared to PGMMV.


[h3]Parameter Inheritance from Animations[/h3]
Not only can you update Node parameters directly within an Animation, those parameter changes are retained at the end of the animation, and thus carry over into subsequent animations. So it’s now possible to easily make an animation where a weapon is dropped, a facial expression changes, or even hair color is changed based on game events without complex scripting. When you combine this functionality with graphics Filters, there is a lot of variety and versatility available easily to any user of ACTION GAME MAKER.


[h3]Shaders in Animations[/h3]
This is for the advanced users, but of course Godot has full shader support via scripting. A shader can be added as a Track to the Animation Player, so there’s really no limits on what kind of effects you can use in ACTION GAME MAKER.


[h3]2D Bone Animations: Collision Movement[/h3]
As each Bone in an animation is a child node, each Bone can also have its own independent collision detection. So this makes it easy to have tracked and controlled collision dynamically updated through the animation. And of course Connection Points are available to easily control projectile generation.


These are only examples, of course! Godot’s Animation Player is richly featured, and when combined with ACTION GAME MAKER’s additional functionalty should allow for a lot of creative uses!

However, there is one unfortunate limitation that has resulted from this change. While this is generally a much more versatile and capable toolset compared with Pixel Game Maker MV, ACTION GAME MAKER will not support the importing of OPTPiX SpriteStudio sspj format animations. Despite the release of SpriteStudio Player for Godot, SpriteStudio animations are not supported due to a variety of technical issues. We understand that some of our existing users have gotten very skilled at using it, but we ask for your understanding on this matter, as the Godot Animation Player does provide mostly equivalent functionality.

Also, while configured sprite animations cannot be imported from Pixel Game Maker MV, the sprite sheets are compatible and setting up sprite animations in ACTION GAME MAKER MV is expected to be a quick process.

And that’s all for this letter! I’ll be back in December for the final letter of 2024. Thank you for your continued interest in ACTION GAME MAKER, and we look forward to sharing more information soon!