>So I would probably lean more toward RPG maker if I wanted to make an RPG

That may be a part of why they chose to take a 3d approach instead. RPG Maker has 20 years of iteration, so it's pretty hard to compete in that space. It's already a bit difficult as is to stand out in a 2D space to begin with.

Meanwhile, 3D is still a hard problem and Voxels give that flexibility to make assets by hand that fit into an overall game.

Hey, developer of RPG Playground here, and I agree with you.

My platform has moderate success (multiple games released each day), but to compete with RPG Maker means being 10x better. I was hoping to grab some of that market, but marketing wise it's incredibly difficult.

Blender had moderate success when it was closed source, but not enough to pay its development, so it was going to die.

After its creator raised €100,000 to release it under the GPL, Blender became the leading open-source 3D tool it is today.

And they make enough money from recurring donations, service subscriptions, merchandise, conferences and trainings.

Blender is great, I also use it. It's a nice example on how a non-developer tool is successful with open source.

There are/were plenty of open source RPG makers, but they never gained any real traction.

I considered open sourcing my product in the past (did so with a previous game), so maybe one day. I still have some big things planned :).

I think Blender was (and still is) exceptionally good at community building. Just freeing your product might not get you enough traction by itself.

Blender itself is also over 20 years old. And it struggled a lot even when opt source until several things came together at once. A mix of a UX overhaul, autodesk pissing off the community, and outreach yielding fruit as corporations experimented with adoption.

I'm not sure if we had that perfect storm in game engines yet. Unity fumbled big time, but Godot wasn't quite mature enough to fully take advantage of that opportunity.

>Just freeing your product might not get you enough traction by itself.

Plus not everyone wants to give their product away. I see that advice all the time here and reddit and other places, "just opensource it" as if that's a solution to every problem a creator might have. I even saw it on a gamedev subreddit where a guy was asking how to make more money and people were saying to make it opensource, as if making it free would somehow increase sales for him.

Clearly you are unfamiliar with the process. Step 1, open source project. Step 2. Step 3, profit.

* Step 1: Ask for $100,000 to fund the start-up

* Step 2: Open source project

* Step 3: Find other streams of revenue (donations, grants, subscriptions, sponsorships)

> it's just nostalgia having grown up playing Final Fantasy games for SNES

What did Nintendo do to you people? I've grown up playing very pixelated games on the ZX Spectrum but I have zero nostalgia for those graphics.

It’s because the art for these games was so good, it didn’t feel like the hardware was a limitation, more like it just had a particular style.

I’m currently playing Octopath Traveler 2 and it completely recreates this feeling, the art is beautiful and very pixelated.

Well, at least the Nintendo nostalgia is saving me money since I can't even look at fake pixelated graphics when I look for new indie games to play.

This is not the only way to do low budget graphics. Too bad very few creators realize it.

What are some other techniques you’ve noticed?

Final Fantasy IV and VI, Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana, Ogre Battle, and Zelda: A Link to the Past all still look great to me to this day. I think it's just a timeless art style. And it's not all just nostalgia, the early 3d games which came in the next generation of consoles, and which I probably spent even more time playing, all look like trash to me.

I guess the showcase is all stills mainly because it's a collection of screenshots shared on the forum, but I really would like to see the engine in motion! I'm not demanding great animation or anything. I get that individual passion projects are limited in their time and energy budget, and he voxel graphics editor looks intentionally minimalistic. But it would still feel more alive.

The community showcase makes it look all over the place and hard to understand what it is (is it just another engine?). I love the current graphics on the homepage though. I'm also sure it's a good choice for their target audience who probably knows RPG Maker but want to make it 3D, which is in fact nostalgic since they probably grew up with Minecraft etc.

You'll probably love [TIC-80](https://tic80.com/).

There’s a new generation that played Minecraft when they where kids, so a new generation of nostalgia ;)