Help! VNM OR RMMV For a first time father?

**Sorry for topic typo and all other misspellings, I wrote this after getting home from overtime smh**

Introduction:
Hello all! This will probably be a long post so i'll.dive right in. I'm 28 and my fiance is expecting our first baby! So with all this responsibility and adultness rushing at us it's time for a good ol' fashion midlife crisis, and mine came in the form of Game making!

Boy Meets Maker:
Long story short I came up with a game when I was 13 and I downloaded rpg maker 2k3 to make the game, like countless rpg maker games it went nowhere fast. Fast forward 7 years to 2010 I got the bug a 2nd time, decide to rewrite the premise of "Fallen Feather" and liked the premise so much I went ahead and wrote a PREQUEL story called "FF:Mother F.E.L.I.C.I.A" , that became a new obsession and I started working on a game for that with RPG Maker XP.
This was worked on pretty much on & off for a little over a year and tipped into 2012. I had almost completed a playable demo and was very proud of the project but it became overwhelming with other life things.

Now it seems I developed a pattern, fast forward yet another 6-7 years and imagine me minding my business at work and BOOM all of a sudden I have the uncontrollable urge to finish both FF and the prequel. I loved the prequel so much I recalled about 80% of the plot and characters that I did have in 15 minutes, but this past week I've been file digging in my hard drive and notebooks getting everything I have compiled and have already begun updating and expanding on it!

Growth & Self Reflection
It's been an exciting past few days, I now realized why I could never finish the series: the story was never done, I had the premises, the ending, and 2 or 3 major plot points in my head but outside of that I was literally writing the story AS I made the game, which often led to me going "ok so now I need an angel Sprite to finish this scene....let's go on google....oh wow this is a realllllly nice ice cave tileset...Oh, I KNOW!!! I'll have my MC get taken from forest and trapped in an ice cave!!!....now I need some cool ice monster sprites....hey this is a realllllyyy nice time machine animation....Oh, I KNOW!"

Rinse-wash-repeat.

So now that I'm older and wiser I decided I wanted to finish the actual story first, the characters, the towns the dungeons, the plot twist, everything done. And THEN I'll start on the game.

I already finished the broad strokes for "mother F.E.L.I.C.I.A: (dont worry the games been renamed lol I did alotttt of renaming for the sake of maturing the story) and have a logical road map from start to end, looking to be a 4-6 hour game, just have to fill in the actual details and dialogue that push the narrative.

I've started renovating the main FF title, but I can already tell it'll be 1.5x the size of "mother F.E.L.I.C.I.A" in content (I'm still trying to cram it down to 5-7 game)


NOW HERE'S WHERE YOU COME IN

I'm 7 years out of practice and out of touch,.I need this story to get out of my system and I dont care how,

before I made a big deal about having the best scripts and custom graphics so much that I made a 500MB unplayable demo, now idc if I have to use RTP only items to get the game done, I just want the story told.

So what would be the best course of action for a guy who's about to have a little one and alotttt less free time??? I know personally my weakest point was maps, although I got much better at designing maps they were a multi-hour job for me and I feel like cutting out maps would make my project alot easier to accomplish. Thus after some thought i was left with either VNM and RMMV

I've been thinking about VNM since in that case I just have to tell the story, the game is a fantasy so I personally would like some fighting interaction but what's most important to me is the storyline right now. My hesitation with VNM is just plain bad reviews, I hear almost nothing 100% good and the community is pretty lacking especially compared to its competitor ren'py and I want people to actually play the game not just make it.for myself.

My other option, the one im mainly leaning towards is RMMV. Now when I switched from 2k3 to XP 7 years later it took me all.of 2 weeks to become an XP monster I learned it and RGSS really.quick do to prior experience, I feel the same would happen with MV, I'm already self taught the new thing is plugins (and that testing yanfly's stuff is a safe start), resource packs sold on this site but ofcourse alot of freebies to be found all over. The fact that I can port to android is s big seller.to me as I want people.to play And most importantly, if.i chose to I could make a Visual Novel WITH battles in rpg maker rather easily. Or I just might get the full blown bug and make the doggone maps.

Conclusion
This go around I'm trying to make smarter decisions and I know I didnt speak more about the actual game but I want to hear from.my other game devs out there who prolly.do have a kid or 2, what would you recommend where I have the best chance completing a 4-7 hour project in this lifetime? And which community is most likely.to.play the game and give feedback?

Any and all feed back would be great!

'Ideas and Prototypes' is for when you are discussing the game itself.
This is probably best in 'Product Discussion and Support'.
[mod]Moving[/mod]

I think that you should aim for a really really simple game first, something that can be done very quickly and takes very little time to play. Finishing is a skill, one that you don't yet have, so you'll need to do a little practice at it to get to know not only the process, but yourself better. This will make finishing your "true" game happen much faster (there've been studies and everything).

Visual Novels are better for making a short game. The focus is on the writing, not the gameplay. From my understanding, VNM is better for people who run into limitations with customization in Ren'Py but still want something more wysiwyg than programming from scratch. Or it's better for people who are used to the programming style of RPG Maker. But for people who are very used to Ren'Py and happy with it, it's a bit jarring and frustrating. There were also a few bugs at the beginning, less now (no program has none). Plus Ren'Py has been around much, much longer, it's had time to work things out and gain a following. VNM, as engines go, is very new. This is just my limited observation though, I could easily be wrong. Can't tell you which is actually better because it depends on your needs and frankly, Ren'Py is competition. You can't get an unbiased opinion here.

I know the feeling of wanting to skip making bad stuff and get to making good games, but that's not how learning works. You've got to practice to get all the stupid out and learn the right skills. Get a few short things done, things that take a month or less to create (for VN's aim for one week), learn about scope and schedule and what helps you do what you need to do and so on, then use actual skill in your real game. You'll be better able to tackle the problems with a bigger game, you'll get the satisfaction of finishing stuff and you won't be as stressed out when your kid gets there and your entire world shifts, nor as regretful that you never finished.

Thank you! i was honestly thinking of just diving into the game but what i've been doing (very proud of myself), i've had MV for a month now but only use it to test plugins i think i may want and how to logically incorporate them into my story, and download ONLY generator part resources and a few monsters. nothing beyond that, i havent touched tilesets nor eventing instead i'm focusing solely on fleshing out the lore and storyline of my plot, i can admit i'm not great at writing something unpredictable (DAMN YOU SHONEN ANIME) but i put an amazing amount of detail into the "why" things are this way.

what i think i will do is once i finish my story outline, which is 70% or so done, i will take your advice and do a nice short story inside my game's world setting. Nothing extensive, maybe a 45minute - 1 hour game focused around an original character that has nothing to do with my bigs project i can complete in a month like you said!

I wouldn't worry too much about plugins or related stories either. Sometimes in order to proceed you need to give yourself permission to fail (backwards I know, but brains are strange). I think if you keep trying too hard to make it useful you will focus too much on getting it right and not enough on getting it done. Go ahead and make a terrible game. Too many expectations when you're still practicing and learning is a great way too fail for real. If you really need it to be good at some point, fix it after you're done. The point isn't good, the point is to finish. If this game is unrelated, you also don't need to have your opus to a specific state before starting this one.

hmmmm, you have a point, i think i'll do just that! :XP02: