One of the most successful development tools with children is RPG Maker. Affordable (no more than the price of a snack), being so simple that a child can use it, and providing features powerful enough to create a complete commercial game from scratch, it's a tool that was destined to be a hit. Even so, maybe for the purpose of having an alternative to the tool, maybe for criticizing the RPG Maker business model, maybe even for wanting a more extensible tool or with additional functionality, or even for financial reasons, you might be interested in looking for some alternative to the tool.

With that in mind, I made a small list of the tools I found. Hope you like it.

Criteria

To be fair and not recommend something absurd like the Unreal Engine, we will focus solely and exclusively on engines for games that fit certain predefined criteria. The criteria I chose were:

• Be a low code engine, that is, that you don't need or that you need to program very little to use;
• Be an engine with a simple intuitive graphical interface;
• Enable the development of a complete game;
• Be free;
• Focus on two-dimensional games;
• Can be used to create complete RPG's;
• Being an engine, and openly saying that (sorry, Roblox and Scratch).

Of course, we had to delete some great tools from the list, but I hope the ones that are left are useful to you.

RPG Paper Maker

The first on the list is precisely an RPG Maker that has the most different design, since, unlike other alternatives, it brings a very characteristic end result. With its games resembling a mix of JRPG and Paper Mario, it will be fun for both new users and those who are already familiar with conventional RPG Maker.

Unfortunately, the price for commercial use of the engine is also quite steep, reaching R$ 139.99 on Steam, something that RPG Maker already allows you to do with its base price. But, if you want to make a game with a beautiful and differentiated look without having to migrate to a more complex engine, RPG Paper Maker can be a good alternative.

You can access the engine's official website here, and add the engine to your Steam account here.

Open RPG Maker

This is a promising project that was unfortunately discontinued in 2014, which focused on recreating RPG Maker from scratch without using proprietary code. The interface was very similar to RPG Maker 2000, as well as how it works, event programming, character movement, controls and many others. At the current stage of development, it is already possible to create and export a complete JRPG game, as well as using custom tiles and events.

Unfortunately, as it is an early stage program, it has many bugs, especially when trying to export the program together with the OpenRM used by the game. If one day it is developed again, it could become a viable alternative for those who want to develop a simple game without much programming.

You can download Open RPG Maker from the official website, or from Sourceforge.

RPG Toolkit

I always hated the RPG Toolkit because I found it very unintuitive. It was simply impossible for me to understand this part. But I was really sad when I saw that the developers went into a period of hiatus, since the tool is really very important for beginner developers, so much so that many of my former schoolmates used the RPG Toolkit to develop their little games in high school.

In addition to making it possible to create simple RPGs using event-driven, you can also use the environment's scripting language and create custom 2D games. However, instead of exporting the game, the export includes a minified version of several engine files, making your game mandatorily released under the GPL license as well (open source).

Even if the project is frozen, the official website is still accessible, as are the repositories on Github, in case you are interested in helping with the project.

OHRRPGCE

That confusing name in the subtitle is an abbreviation for “Official Hamster Republic Role Playing Game Construction Engine”, a huge name (literally) and with little popularity (I think the guy who wrote this wanted to beat the record for words in the name of an engine). Despite being a confusing name, and having little relevant documentation on the internet, the tool is still active, and allows, among other things, you to create and export complete games using little programming knowledge (although it still needs a little knowledge).

Although the system looks a lot like a simple game making application, it features a very active (for its size) and receptive community, an Android engine build (this is pretty cool) and even an official page in Portuguese (there is an official translation of the engine too, but the page is giving me a 403 error).

You can download the engine here.

Wolf RPG Editor Engine

This engine is very interesting, since it is not a simple copy, but a tool of its own, with its own resources, a clear objective, a good time on the market, an active community (mostly because of the Japanese) and even advantages, such as a third layer in the construction of maps (which only exists in RPG Maker XP), more options for customizing events and tile size, and makes it possible to create a complete and complex game in less time than RPG Maker MV, its most similar competitor. On the other hand, it doesn't have all the support and compatibility of RPG Maker, as well as the use of custom scripts to add functions to the game (at least I didn't find it, and I looked a lot).

The initial experience of a non-Japanese person creating a game with the Wolf RPG Editor is a lot like a gastrointestinal wash, as you're going to get a pretty bad headache. I'm not saying it won't work, on the contrary, everything works very well (some things even better than RPG Maker, by the way), but the positioning of the elements and their arrangement by the engine (which, for someone familiar with with RPG Maker, it gives that weird deja vu feeling), just with some errors in the English translation, they will confuse you a little while developing something more professional and out of the box, apart from the almost absolute absence of reference in English, such as tutorials and handouts. However, if you manage to deal with these small quirks, you will have a very interesting tool at hand, which is as easy to use as RPG Maker, is also event-oriented and has features that RPG Maker itself no longer offers or even never offered.

As I've said before, it's not a clone of RPG Maker, but a complete engine that seeks to reach the same market, bringing similar functionality, a (supposedly) better performance than RPG Maker and even commercial games developed with the engine, such as LiEat. Despite having used little, I liked the result, and, honestly, it seems to me to be a very powerful tool, despite the difficulties.

You can download the engine here or from the official website.

RPG Maker VX Ace Lite

Well, this one needs no introduction, it's basically RPG Maker VX Ace with a few minor limitations. You can download it here.

RPG Maker 95

I was in doubt whether to put this one here, since, despite still being considered intellectual property, it is also abandoned, and is not even commercialized anymore (and, trust me, there are reasons why this museum piece is no longer used), so it fits like abandonware (and the company will hardly try to sue you for using it, because nowadays you can only use him if you're too stubborn).

I tried to develop a project for about 30 minutes, until I gave up (so as not to break the monitor with a punch). Everything crashes, everything crashes, nothing works as it should… In short, I'd rather hide a cabbage inside my ear than try to develop something commercially. I'll tell you a little bit about my difficulties here.

To begin with, for some reason, RPG Maker 95 can't create new projects, only modify old projects. I really didn't understand why, I even researched on forums, and I saw that what the community usually does is take a demo that the game provided with the disc and modify it, so you'll have to download it too. RPG Maker 95 also needs the late Windows 95 or Windows 98 to run (the versions I tested I managed to run on Windows XP, but I can't guarantee it will run), so you'll need a virtual machine (it was no use using the Windows 10 backwards compatibility nor DosBox on Ubuntu, I really needed a virtual machine).

In addition to these issues, importing elements and exporting the game is also a bit confusing, as is embedding the run library. In practice, using RPG Maker 95 nowadays is basically having a demo of RPG Maker 2000, only with fewer functions and worse compatibility.

To be fair, there is one case where using RPG Maker 95 is useful: when you want to release a game for a legacy product with extremely limited hardware. But honestly, do you really want to release a game for Windows 95 in the middle of 2022?

Some places where I found it were gamingroom and RPG Maker AOM.

My personal opinion

Don't be inventive, wait for RPG Maker to go on sale on Steam to buy it instead of looking for free low code alternatives. The only ones that are really useful for you to create and export your little game commercially are RPG Paper Maker and Wolf RPG Editor Engine, the others I just use out of curiosity. This scenario can still change, but I sincerely doubt it, it is a market where RPG Maker is already consolidated, besides not seeming to have much interest on the part of developers in creating a free and/or open source alternative in the short term to the RPG Maker. And seriously, in the countries where I checked the price, the engine on sale costs less than an indie game, apart from the company's support, which is impeccable.