How long did it take you?

How long did it take you to learn MV comfortably? Did you have prior experience or did you teach yourself with the help of the community? 

I have a decent grasp of MV now, took me around 2 months. I did have a background in regular programming (Visual Basic and C++), which helped me get the basic concepts a little more quickly, i'm sure. I watched the videos online (SumRndmDde in particular -- these were huge for me!) and just tinkered with it myself.

I've been poking around RPG Maker programs for some time now... I then went to school, got some knowledge in programming, came back to it and it's actually easier to use. When I can't figure out how to do something, I google, and when google fails me, I ask here!


So really... for me it's just combined knowledge over the years. I didn't really dedicate time to learning it.

I've been using Rpg Maker and it's various iterations for years. So learning the intricacies of MV took me about a year. I had the basics down in a month but I didn't really harness its full power until now. 

Do any of you have any useful information for a beginner? I suppose one of them will be against what I'm thinking "Don't bother trying to make your first game some unique amazing flashy thing, you have to progress first."

I dunno. A lot of people say "don't make your first game x." But it really depends on how you define "first game." Lots of people put countless hours into tiny projects learning to do this or that, testing what the engine can do, determining whether something they want to try can be evented or needs scripts, and so on. I don't think anyone can honestly say they're on the same level of people going "hi i bought this 3 months ago and i'm going to remake Skyrim i need a team."


Personally, I think it's just a matter of how much you've already learned and where your skills are. If you need 30 plugins, someone to do custom art (for free, of course) and custom music (also for free because the game's obviously going to be amazing), you're probably not ready for your big game. If you're at the point of your design that you can clearly outline "what I need" and "what would be nice" and have a budget in place for the things you absolutely need, plus also have a good grasp on your game engine, you're probably good to go. If you feel like you'll probably wind up looking at the beginning and having to go redo things, you may want to wait.


I've found a good test for your skillset is join a contest. You end up needing to start something from scratch, work within a set of restrictions, and work within a hard deadline. Something like that, I have found, is a great way to highlight your strengths and weaknesses, and is also a good way to separate things you really need for your game to work from the stuff that is fluff and polish (good to have, but not strictly necessary).

I did a lot of work with RPG Maker 2k3, so that's where my background is. Other than that, to get up to speed on MV, I watched a lot of great MV beginner tutorials on YouTube. There's so much good stuff on there it's almost too much!

Very little time, but I came from 2 years on ACE, and it is the same event wise, all that's changed is the internal language and the tile size. Now if you ask me how long it took me to learn ACE, 2 years, and still going :p .