I'll begin this review with I'm 36, not 16. I have no illusions about making a game and distributing it for gain. This is a hobby for me and that is the perspective I write this review from. I have a day job. I moonlight as a hobby pixel artist, and that drives me to dev software to have fun with, and bring it to life.

I began with RPG Maker MV as my first dip into game dev software. I do not have a desire to learn to code so that software was more interesting to me compared to more advanced engines. After years in RMMV I felt the want for more control from the ground up, and not be boxed in by hard limitations from the software, and the need for plugins to break through those hard limitations. Pixel Game Maker MV grants me that feeling. I did not feel like the learning curve to get going on a project was difficult, even without a large database of video tutorial content on YouTube at the time.

Some weaknesses of the software at the time of the review is the dialogue system. It's clunky and not intuitive. The devs understand this though and are working towards improving it. There is also a lack of information on the software, I mean ways to educate yourself and advance in the software to do more complicated mechanics and features. Baz is starting to compile a nice selection of content on YouTube that helps new devs. General bugs as well, the devs are also focused on stability and have shown that in their updates. As a Factorio player this makes me most happy. :) The most legendary bug squashing devs of all time.

The software is about as intuitive as RMMV. Events in Pixel Game Maker MV are "Actions" and after some time with the objects, a dev transitioning from RM should pick up on the software pretty quick. I'm a noob with objects and actions still. I spend more time in the animation/tileset/scene creation areas of the software. I love it all, and the animation portion of the software is what sold it for me. The layers in the scene (map) editor let me have fun with tilesets I create.

Everything I wanted to tweak in RMMV to add extra creativity, that I could not do, I can with PGMMV. My creativity wall is usually only blocked by the limitation of my own knowledge of the software, and not the software itself.

The demo gives anyone a fair amount of time to estimate the software and if it's for them, so there is no reason not to check it out if one feels like they need to switch things up for a bit.

I feel more devs are on my side of the table, as in, this is just a hobby. If that is you, then check this ♥♥♥♥ out...

It's been a long time coming, but I'm now ready to weigh in my thoughts on Pixel Game Maker MV. I've been using this software since early access back in 2018.

Pixel Game Maker MV is a great game development engine for those that are not programmers, and want to be able to create either side scrolling or top down action games. It's got enough for a single person development operation to chew on here to create the game you want to create in the way you want it created; bearing in mind that you operate within the program's limits. If programming/scripting is outside your reach (or if it's something you can do), this is a great engine that has the potential to be amazing as long as the developers continue with updates & performance improvements. There are assets and DLC that is available at the time of writing for you to get a jump on a concept quickly, but there are no asset standards (outside of keeping things divisible by 2) to conform with.


Read on further for more details.



Pixel Game Maker MV is a game engine that uses visual programming to give life to game objects. It specializes in more retro pixel art games that take place either in a side scrolling plane, top down view, or BOTH if you want to make it so. The engine is not based on delta time, but this is the standard for a lot of Japanese game development.

The engine's workflow is divided into sections.

“Scenes” are where you'll create the actual game maps and place objects. You set up title screens and menus here as well.

“Tiles” allows you to put together you imported tile sets and get them ready for scenes. You can create “gimmick” tiles that allow you to do effects like instant death, particle generation & more.

“Animations” allow you to put together game animations to be used for objects. The animation system is robust to allow for custom hit box, collision, and wall tile boxes. This is also where you can put together effects and create particle effects inside the engine with a wide variety of options and effects.

“Objects” is the bones and meat of the engine. This is where you put together objects to handle varying game systems such as menus, weapons, pick ups, NPCs, etc. Using the visual programming in tandem with run-time commands, you can build practically anything you want. You can use JavaScript or CoffeeScript to help simplify commands and functions as well.

“Resources” is where your image graphics, audio, game text and more is stored and organized. Importing your assets here is required in order to use them in other spots of the Engine.

“Plug-Ins” allows you to manage plugins created by the development team or by the community. Plug-Ins extend the engine's capabilities via JavaScript similar to that of RPG Maker MV/MZ.

“Database” (in beta at the time of this writing) allows you to set up variable values in tables and rows that can be called by a single run-time command.

Personally, I really enjoy the workflow. It's great if you know how to organize your assets and objects in a logical manner. You can even import and export objects, animations, scenes and more; allowing for some collaboration to occur with other users of Pixel Game Maker MV.


The engine has a focus on side scrolling action games and top down view actions games. So, you can create something like classic “Castlevania” games or even older “Legend of Zelda” style games.


This engine is focused primarily on 2D pixel art graphics. Though, hand drawn graphics can be achieved as long as you stick to smaller game resolutions. Tile sizes supported are 8x8, 10x10, 12x12, 16x16, 20x20, 24x24, 30x30, 32x32, 40x40, 48x48, 60x60, & 64x64. The engine supports 4:3 and 16:9(10) resolutions with the ability to specify a resolution not on the drop down list. Higher project size resolutions do have large performance impacts, but I will touch on this later on.


Pixel Game Maker has a brief manual on how the basic functions work. However, the development team and the community have worked together to provide video tutorials through Baz via YouTube, and there is a Wiki where more things are being added as time goes on ( Check out the wiki here![pixel-game-maker-mv.fandom.com]). And if you want more live help, we have a large Discord community you can hop in and get some help (link in the steam forums).


I'll talk about performance from two avenues; the editor (where you create the games) and the player (what runs said games).

The Editor was rough in it's early access phase, which is to be expected. Ever since 1.0 though, the editor has been fine to work with. I haven't had any crashes or freezes since the 1.0 launch. Sometimes loading certain tabs can take a bit if you have a lot of assets and objects, but this can be mitigated by placing an empty folder at the very top of your lists. Is this an area that can be improved? Absolutely; but for where we're currently at, the engine is stable and works quite well. It doesn't have true multi-monitor support at this time, but that wasn't a deal breaker for me (I have 3 monitors and a tablet hooked up to my PC).

The Player could use more optimization for lower spec machines like APUs or machines using integrated graphics, but this is still much better than where they started in early access and my GTX 970 rocks games made with this quite well running smoothly at 60 FPS (the engine cap). This is both on an AMD Phenom II x4 and AMD Ryzen 5 3600 processors with the GTX 970. AMD graphics seem to fall behind here, and I'm not sure if this is due to driver support or engine support at this time. This is based off users playing my game demo and reporting lag and slow down issues. Also, if you create games at higher resolutions (say at and above 720p), your game will struggle due to having to draw a large window and handle object processing on screen. So, the higher your project's resolution is, the less objects you can generally have on screen without taking a hit to performance.


At the time of this writing, game export to Windows platforms is the only export. However, major work has been done to help get games onto the Nintendo Switch and it is almost ready. Export for other systems has been suggested and the development team has taken that feedback in, but have not committed to any hard time line for these features.

That concludes my review on Pixel Game Maker MV! I hope you found it educational. If there's anything else people would like me to comment on, feel free to comment on this review! If you wanna try out my game, “Eden Gamma”, the demo is available on Itch.io! (https://abstract-red-studio.itch.io/eden-gamma).

Follow me on Twitter for updates on “Eden Gamma”, Pixel Game Maker MV tips and tricks, and for all my music works.
https://twitter.com/Abstract_Origin

Before I share my mind,
I must mention that I'm not a programmer, I'm a professional animator.
You may have seen my work in: "The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth" all the Ending Cutscenes animated by me.

LET'S BEGIN:
I'm very new to PGM and I'm still trying to learn and understand how to use it.
Originally I came from Construct Game Engine, so I can't say that PGM is easier to learn because Event-Sheet as visual-scripting is defiantly MUCH easier to understand, follow and organize compare to Nodes-Based which gets really messy with many arrows and boxes all over the place once you add more complicated code. it gets very confusing, very fast.

BUT!
The idea of State-Machine and built-in functions makes things easier to start with, yet the learning curve isn't that simple. Without watching YouTube tutorials it's very hard to understand by yourself.
Luckily there are few dedicated PGM tutorial channels on YouTube that are really good and helpful!

I'm not a fan of the built-in tutorials, they confuse me with all the wrong position arrows who point to different places.
Honestly, I would get rid of it and just point to Step-by-Step Video Tutorials by PGM (they should definitely make official video tutorials).

USER INTERFACE:
I never used RPG Maker so I can't compare the UI, for me it's a completely new user experience.
Yes, the UI is a bit confusing, I hope that the dev team will redesign it to something that is more user friendly, don't get me wrong it's not too bad, it's just designed in a way that a visual artist (such as myself) can't follow compared to other game engines.

The State Machine Nodes, starting clean and it's very easy to make basic things such as move, jump, etc..
Once you get your character moving, jumping or shooting, it will satisfy you and will make you try new things.

STABILITY:
Don't let the hours confuse you, sometimes I animated characters or drew pixels for hours while PGM is sitting in the background and counting hours... so I'm not the best example, but this is my impression so far.
I haven't ran into a crash yet, but maybe because I didn't do anything complex, or... maybe PGM is robust! :)

GAME ENGINE POWER:
The engine itself is very powerful, fast, smooth and responsive and that's noticeable as soon as you run any sample or your game!
from my short time testings it consider I didn't use many layers, complicated code or large resolution, after all it is built for Pixel Graphics and it does the job GREAT!

COMPILE - BUILT YOUR GAME:
From what I know, so far it's limited to compile only PC .exe files at the moment, I hope we'll see more options to build for Android, and most of all... Game Consoles!

COMMUNITY:
The community seems to be small but AMAZING, whenever I had a question, I got few answers from the community forums.
This is where I encourage people to join and make PGM's community even bigger!

CONCLUSION + TIPS: (before you buy)
Overall it's fun creating things with PGM (I'm not the best example), but even start moving, jumping, shooting etc..
The more you add to your game and see it evolve the more you'll get into PGM for sure!

If you're not a programmer (just like me) and you want to make a game, this is my advice for you:
DOWNLOAD the DEMO, play with it, try the samples, follow some Video Tutorials, try to do stuff...
If you like this experience, SUPPORT THE DEVS AND BUY PGM! This will help them continue to develop it and improve it.

SUGGESTIONS: - (for the Developers, please consider these)
1. If the PGM devs, will add an ALTERNATIVE programming-mode as addition or alternative to the State-Machine nodes it will make a HUGE improvement, for example:  Event Sheets programming similar to what you can see on Construct 2, 3, ClickTeam Fusion and GDevelop... the result will be that: People will FALL IN LOVE with PGM in 2 seconds because it's MUCH easier to learn, use, organize, find your code and manipulate it dynamically compare to nodes...
Again, you don't have to REPLACE the nodes, but add an alternative way so the user can CHOOSE which one to use when starting a project. Nobody will use nodes if you'll add 'Event Sheets' (consider you'll make it simple as the others I mention).

2. We need more built-in functions, "actions" we need things like "While this happen, do this" trying to solve everything with the state-machine is not very dynamic or "open" that's why I suggested the event sheet approach, please consider it and in the meanwhile expand more and more built-in functions built in to the engine to make things easier to solve logically and less complicated with zillion of arrows and nodes all over the place.

3. IMPORT: as a professional animator, me and many others are not using Sprite-Sheet as our high priority but we prefer to use PNG-Sequence. Like most game engines, please add import option for PNG Sequence, so we can import raw of animations in once click, for example:  IDLE_001.png, IDLE_002.png, IDLE_003.png - Drag and Drop a directory or file-by-file and BAAAM! it will be ready to use! (good example: Construct, ClickTeam Fusion, Game Maker Studio 2, Godot)

These are just a few of my suggestions, I have many more ideas to improve PGM, but I hope you'll consider these 3 for start and I hope to see PGM grow and get better, keep up the great work you're doing Dev Team! :)

* Sorry about my bad English,
I hope that this review helps both Buyers and the Developers.

Ok, so its buggy, the interface needs a *lot* of work before it will be as user friendly as its more mature RPG Maker sibling, the sample resources included are almost non-existant and the user manual is lacking on detail.... but I kinda expected this when I bought it, and despite its bugs you *can* still use it. Using it reminded me of the early fan made translations before we got an official translation of RPG Maker. Is it worth the money that they are currently asking? Maybe, if you know a bit about how games work, but not if your an absoliute beginner. Will it be worth it if they finish the product to the same quality as RPG Maker? Yes, and if you are an absolute beginner you might want to wait for this to happen before you drop the kind of money they are asking. Due to this (and its obvious Early Access status) I am going to give a tentativly positive review. The product is still under construction and if you buy a product in Early Access and complain about it not being finished you have kinda missed the point.

I know it's early access, but atm i don't recommend it. It crashes way to often even after a simple task of saving the project with verrrry small changes, the interface is extremely ugly, it gives you no real tutorial, little to no default resources for the user to experiment with, not fully translated, and is definitly not user friendly despite claiming to be related to the rpg maker series. I'm sorry to say but at this current moment, don't bother. They have way too much that need fixing and is not worth the price.

I'm going into this review having used PGM a ton earlier in its development, don't let my steam time log fool you.
Unfortunately, finally checking out 0.9.3, I see that nothing has changed.
The user base's fundamental problems with PGM aren't being addressed, nor does it look like the developers have any intent of doing so.*

Originally this review was much longer, so I've tried to condense it, and if I ever finish a video review, I'll link it here. Just read my final thoughts if there's too many words.

-UI-
The user interface problems are infamous. In addition to being completely unintuitive, it doesn't seem to scale at all, so unless you have the exact monitor specifications the devs do, apparently nothing is ever going to quite fit right.
Ui is the number 1 complaint I see. Professional reviews, steam reviews, complaints on message boards, etc.
If even half of the most obvious mistakes were fixed, you'd win the endorsement of a lot of people who really want to love this program, myself included.

-Animations-
This is by far the jankiest, worst designed part of the entire program.
PGM doesn't have a native graphics editor, which I don't mind. What I do mind is literally everything else .
Once you've struggled through importing your spritesheet (its own adventure), you're greeted by the uninterpretable UI for converting your sprite sheet into a library of actions your object can take. What PGM does have is a hit box editor which can be changed frame by frame. PGM also has a system of 4 different hit boxes that each object can have, each of which has its own properties and no explanation besides its name. Good luck.
You can drag/resize the hit boxes with your mouse, but the outline of the box is pixel perfect, and if you miss, it will instead grab the sprite and offset the whole image. This is insane.
The only real way to do boxes accurately is just to type the box size and coordinates into the table next to the sprite.

-Built in character controls-
This is easily the best part.
Once that nightmare is complete, you're left with one of the best parts of the program, a character with inherent platforming logic. You inform the program which direction the character is pointing in each action, and it bridges the gap. A tab in the objects profile will let you select the characters horizontal speed, jumping, damage output, health, etc.
Once you've informed PGM of the control scheme, you more or less have a functioning character. This is the best part of the program. The program knows you're making a platformer (or top-down), so you don't have to re-invent the wheel every single time. This is what kept me with PGM so long.

-Plugins-
There is now a grand total of 3 plug-ins that try and gap some of the significant holes the program has.
1) Map auto-tiling, ported from RPG maker
2 & 3) UI for making branching dialogue trees that trigger variables
These need to be already integrated into the program. (Or at the very least, the auto-tile does.)

-Map making-
The tile based scene creation seems to more or less be a port of RPG maker's, but with an obstacle course of ill fitting windows trying to stop you.
Side note: Gimmick tiles (tiles that have triggers when touched) just barely work. Do not use them.
The built in slopes function seems to function pretty well, but only on side scrollers. Top downs they work... mostly.

-Programming logic-
People complain about PGM's visual building blocks style, citing that it becomes a big tangled mess of lines and boxes. I think this also applies to regular code, documentation, or lawn mower instructions. If you write it, the way in which you organize it can make all the difference. If you read it, you have to have a basic understand of what you're looking at.
I'm an incredibly visual learner, which makes it easy for me to arrange the nodes in a way that makes sense to me. At this point, the programming logic is the only thing that would make me consider staying with PGM.
I can't let it get away totally scott-free though. That UI is still haunting you, and I'm often surprised by a function that the program doesn't have built in. (Side note: Why is the easiest thing in the whole program to implement screen shaking?)

- Cutscenes, camera control, and other scene specific events -
HAhahahahaha good luck

- Physics -
hahahahaha GOOD LUCK. Just because its there, fairly powerful, and pretty functional, (in the one demo that uses it extensively), it doesn't mean its a beast worth waking up. The physics engine does not like dealing with unusual circumstances, so don't rely on anything physics enabled to be essential to the play experience. Demonstration: go into the motocross demo and see if you can alter any physics properties of the bike without rendering the demo unplayable. (It might cause the bike to literally explode, if you're lucky).

- Final thoughts -
I desperately want to recommend Pixel Game Maker MV. I really, really do. But the program wants to be taken seriously, with a price-tag to match.
It's not broken, but this is even worse. Everything is technically serviceable, and so it won't be fixed. I could almost see myself finishing a game on the program. Its fantastic features have pushed me to work around it's not-quite-broken features, and I've learned a lot (particularly about abstract thinking). The fact that parts of the program are still in untranslated Japanese shows where the dev's priorities lay. The program should have gone another two years of closed door development before being released in its early access form.
Currently, I'd be willing to pay $15 to buy this program again. That may come off as harsh, but Game Maker Studio, Construct, and many other excellent dev platforms are free.

*The devs seem active, and will answer questions sometimes. Its a high priority for them to fix bugs that crash the program, but anything else, (awful UI, waste of time documentation, animation manager) more or less won't be acknowledged, and are relegated to "and lots of other changes coming soon!™"

TLDR: Remember Fallout 4 VR on day one? This is the game dev equivalent. It just works.™

I'm known as StudioDaeera. I'm the creator of Coma State Eden.
https://studiodaeera.itch.io/coma-state-eden

If you'd like to see what you can make with PGMMV once you know what you're doing, my games are very good examples. Most of it was done without using any syntax.

I also created Now You've Made Me Crabby:
https://studiodaeera.itch.io/now-youve-made-me-crabby

The program does have some annoying limitations, and on several occasions the GUI has bugged on me/been less co-operative, and there's the occasional crash where I lose progress. Ultimately, the program's strengths are quite potent and I would recommend you give it a chance if you're considering game development but aren't interested in (or are terrible at) programming. The program has a really good animation editor, it's probably my favourite part about PGMMV.



Pro-tip:
If you feel it's too expensive, wait until it goes on sale. They have been quite generous with the sales they've done and you can get yourself a good deal.

Look here kids.
Do you want to make your own Castlevania?
Do you want to make your own Megaman?
Do you want to make your own Ys?

Then you are in luck, this IS the perfect tool for you.
Easy to live with, able to use RMMV's tilesets, and no need for coding most vital scripts like basic movement, pretty much care free type of animation/screen building/transition setting/object placement. And zero scripting needs of creating text bubbles (Looking at you GMS2, and your godawful way to make a single text string pop up on screen).


Also the animation tooling is so powerful, that you can actaully make anime with this, form hue change to blur, form resize to rotation, form transpranet to clocking, sometimes I wonder if Kadokawa's animation depertment use the very same tooling for making their older anime.......

Would very recommend this, just mind you there are some very rough edges because this is by far a very early access version, you will have to withstand the poor performence, and some major bugs.

I see a lot of potential in this engine, and it could be something really special, but it's not quite there. I was extremely disappointed to see some of the tabs and labels are STILL in Japanese. When the integral part of software is UI based, it's kind of important that people can understand it.

Secondly, the UI is quite a mess and is not very pleasant to use. I understand this is early access, so this wasn't the primary problem for me, but I really hope they do work on cleaning it up. If you're supplying a tool that allows people to create games without code, the interface needs to look and feel great, and it just doesn't.

Now, if you're coming across from one of their previous products, like RPG Maker, do NOT expect a warm and welcoming process as you're used to. Pixel Game Maker MV is aimed at creating all kinds of games with far more customisation than RPG Maker, so it's obviously going to have a far higher learning curve. I just want you to understand that before thinking you're going to be spitting out a game in a day, because you won't.

Another potential pitfall (through no fault of its own) is that there is very limited resources in terms of help and guides for this tool as it is still fairly new. This is another reason it may be better to wait for it to mature a little more.

In conclusion, I found it's not worth the asking price in its current state, but with the UI cleaned up and fixed translations, it very well could be. All the features are definitely there.
If you're reading these reviews because you're thinking about buying it, my advice would be to keep a close eye on it for a while before making a purchase.

After much consideration I decided on giving this engine a thumbs up. I will start with the pros side of things.

Pros,

- I really enjoy the simplicity of the "state machine" style of logic control.
-It supports tilemaps
-Not restricted to 32x32 or 48x48 tiles or objects
-The animation configuration tool is fantastic
-Handles variables
-Easy to learn
-BAZ on youtube has some great tutorials
-Plenty of events and actions
-Does Support limited multiplayer (Also a Con)
-Great particle and light effects
-Supports large objects of different sizes
-Easy Save and Load feature though limiting
-Has a RPG style text system add-on with select choice.

The Cons,

-No string variables (limits a lot of game types)
-Hud is very limiting
-Random FPS drops on finished products even on high end machines
-Trigger areas are difficult to configure and are round with no square selection
-Multiplayer is very very limited, though supported.
-Updates are very few and if you come across a bug....chances are the developer will not fix anytime soon.

Overall I enjoy the game engine, if it wasn't for the FPS issues I get on exported games at random times (mostly while moving in 8 directions but randomly other times) this would have been a great choice for my passion project.

I leave you with this, if you don't mind doing a few work arounds for the HUD system and keep your project simple this will be a great engine for you. if you ever figure out why the FPS drops randomly causing the game to stutter let me know. hope this helps anyone looking to buy.

Great alternatives to this engine would be the following

-RPG Architect
-Gdevelope
-Construct 3
-With Caution RPG maker series
-Game Maker Studio
-001 Game Creator
-Click Team Fusion 2.5
-CopperCube (3D Engine)
-Game Maker Studio