RPG Maker to Godot: rebuild your RPG in Godot 4

To the Moon was made in RPG Maker XP and is still one of the most quoted games ever made in it. The engine is excellent at the game it was built for: a tile-based RPG with a menu, a party and turn-based battles. People move to Godot when their game stops being that, when they want real-time combat, a camera that moves, 3D, or a UI that does not look like every other RPG Maker game.

Nothing converts an RPG Maker project into a Godot one. But RPG Maker is unusually kind to a rebuild, because almost everything that makes your game yours is data rather than code.

RPG Maker MV and MZ keep a project in its data folder as JSON: Actors.json, Classes.json, Skills.json, Items.json, Enemies.json, Troops.json, States.json, System.json, CommonEvents.json, and one MapNNN.json per map. Each map holds its tile layers and its events, and each event page is a list of commands with numeric codes: 101 shows text, 102 shows choices, 111 is a conditional branch, 121 and 122 set switches and variables, 201 transfers the player, 301 starts a battle.

That is what the AI reads. A switch becomes a flag on an autoload, a variable a property, a common event a function, and an event page a script on a node in the map's scene. The database becomes Godot Resources, one per actor, skill, item and enemy, which you can edit in the Inspector.

XP, VX and VX Ace store their data as Ruby Marshal files (.rxdata, .rvdata, .rvdata2), which are binary. Export them to JSON or YAML with a dumping script first, and they are read the same way.

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A map becomes a scene with TileMapLayer nodes, one per layer, from the same tileset images. RPG Maker's autotiles become terrains in a Godot TileSet, which pick the right edge tile from the cells around them. Map events become nodes at the same tile positions; the player becomes a CharacterBody2D that moves on the grid, or freely if that was why you left.

Message windows and choices become a dialogue box built from Control nodes. The menu and the shop become scenes of their own. The default battle system is rewritten as a GDScript state machine over your Troops and Skills data, which is also the moment to change it.

MV and MZ plugins are JavaScript, and each one is reimplemented for what it does, not translated line by line.

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The tilesets, characters, faces and battlers that ship with RPG Maker come under its maker's licence, not yours, and that licence is written around games made with RPG Maker. Read its terms before you ship those assets in a Godot game. Art you made or commissioned is yours to move.

If the default art has to go, the rebuild is the time to replace it. Flockbay generates pictures on its hosted usage, uses free asset packs from its library, or uses your own files.

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Put the project folder where Flockbay can read it and open a new game. Tell Flockbay what you are bringing and what you want to change. It reads the data files, writes a brief of what it rebuilds first and what changes on the way, and builds nothing until you approve it.

A sensible order is one map, the player, its events and the dialogue box, played to check it feels right, before the database, the menus and the battles. Flockbay checks its own work by playing the game, and you play it against the original.