Best products from r/RPGMaker

Full disclosure - I own 0 of the three tools.

Sakan - A $15 tool that can do everything GIMP can do, only without all of GIMP's other features. Sure, using GIMP or another image editor will require that you learn a few things about how tilesets are put together, moreso if you edit the A1 tiles, but these are easily learnable things. $15 USD is a pretty steep asking price when GIMP exists, as well as many other pixel art programs that provide greater flexibility than being custom built for MV. I see no reason to get this. If it was $5 or under - that's a different proposition but even then - would still probably skip it.

Gene - For $20 USD you can take 20 minutes to build a scene rather than 2 hours. This may matter greatly if your game is a lot of chained scenes - people using RPGMaker to make things that are more like Visual Novels will probably get a lot of mileage out of it. On the other hand, $20 is $20. This does nothing for you that you couldn't figure out on your own, this just helps the process. It's maybe more like getting a fancy screwdriver set with dozens of different heads when a basic six piece set will also get you there.

Mado - I'll admit right now that I've not spent much time messing with how windows appear and I really need to fix that. But even without knowing anything about how to do it, $10 seems high for what looks to be a very straightforward image replacer.

Since you mention the bundle, here's how I'm going to suggest you look at it -

The top tier is $50. For that, you get RPGMaker MV (which regularly goes on sale for $20-30) and Visual Novel Maker (I've not paid a lot of attention, but if it's gone on sale I can't see it going for anything other than the MV range). Dropping $25 each on them is completely reasonable and is absolutely a great deal.

For doing so, you get a shitload of free stuff. Because you have it, might as well use it, but I'll go ahead and say that a lot of the free stuff you're getting is stuff you probably wouldn't have purchased and probably won't end up using - and that's 100% okay. Because it was free crap thrown in to your $25 purchase of RPGMMV and $25 purchase of VNM.

You are either going to have to buy the OST and or torrent it. SquareEnix still cares very much about it's music properties and doesn't make it easy to acquire unless you want to pay for it. Nobody here is going to provide you a link as I believe it's against the rules, and if not against the rules, heavily frowned upon.

Edit: Here you go. a legal grey area. MIDI files. The original compositions were MIDI so these are probably good enough for your purposes. Here.

Thanks! I strongly recommend reading Lee Sheldon's book on character and story it's helped me out a ton.

After thousands of hours and 3 total reboots it's crazy to have it out for people to play. If you want to check it out you can find it on the Play Store or Amazon App Store.

I want to get it on Steam later, but right now the controls are built around a touch screen.

You don't even have to spend 300-400.

Look into one of these, u/SirCreamyLemon

https://www.amazon.com/Beginning-RPG-Maker-Darrin-Perez/dp/148421966X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1497810215&sr=1-1&keywords=RPG+Maker

One thing to have in mind many is that there are several horror subgenres, and that somes rules change because of that. A slasher movie is very different from a psychological horror. Mistery is certainly an integral part of the horror effect, but in varying degrees. OP must identify his story's profile. TV tropes can help with that.

The Philosophy of Horror is an excellent book on the subject, and the author defends the theory that horror is the result of a monster (or any scary entity) that is, at the same time, highly dangerous and extremely fascinating. What scares you the most is not only the fact that the monster poses a real threat to your life, sanity or well-being, but that, at the same time, you cannot resist an urge to know and understand this creature. That is why, for example, we HAVE to check that noise in the back of the house (where the monster is). That's the explanation why many horror movie characters put themselves in extremely dangerous situations: they must know, even if their lives are at risk. The monster is an irresistible source of fascination!

That is, of course, only one theory, but a very persuasive one.

/u/TheJsDev, if you're reading this: the book is awesome, but it's a philosophy book and you don't have to read everything, okay? I don't remember it very well, but I think the introduction and the first chapter are enough for your purposes. It get's a bit more complicated and specialized after this.