Ren'ai Maker - Splashbun

Maxine Hardy / Splashbun

Old Game Engines, and Ren'Ai Maker

I'm a big fan of old computers and software, particularly software intended for things like creating music, art, 3D models, and games. Whether or not I have the patience to actually use them is a different story, but it's always fun to poke around and see what creatives were up to back in the day. I am especially fond of the older entries in the RPG Maker series, having played around with '95 quite a bit as a kid. I never managed to make anything more than just rooms and towns, but just making rooms and towns was the majority of the fun for me.

My engine of choice as a kid was GameMaker; when I first started using GameMaker, the newest version was 7, and yoyogames.com was still a place for people to upload the games they made. One of my long-term goals as a GameMaker user was to make a turn-based RPG, which ended with me creating project after project to test new ideas, get frustrated when things didn't work, and give up. Finding out about RPG Maker, where all of the hard parts were built-in features, absolutely blew my mind.

At the time, VX was brand new, and XP was still popular. Both of them cost money, and being a child with none, I settled on the free RPG Maker 2003. Like I said before, I never got much farther than making rooms and towns and overworlds with the built-in tilesets, or creating impossibly difficult boss enemies for me to fight with my equally impossibly strong player character, but it was a lot of fun.

Later, as a teenager, I became aware of 2D Fighter Maker 2nd, and became inspired to make my own fighting games. 2D Fighter Maker isn't nearly as intuitive as the RPG Maker series, and it also doesn't come with any built-in assets, so I gave up pretty quickly. I'm not super into fighting games, anyway, so I'm not sure why I was so gung-ho about making some, anyway, but the passion to learn how everything worked just wasn't there like it was for RPG's. After I gave up on 2D Fighter Maker, I did try to make a fighting game from scratch in GameMaker, which went about as well as you'd expect.

Nowadays, RPG Maker is still around and as popular and powerful as ever, and the little bit I've gotten to play around with MZ and MV have been very fun. There are also non-ACSII engines in the same spirit that I'm very fond of, like RPG Paper Maker, which is free, and a joy to use; if I had access to RPG Paper Maker as a kid, I'd have been unstoppable.

These are the ACSII/Enterbrain engines that I was familiar with, but there were a lot more that never had as much if any time in the limelight as RPG Maker or 2D Fighter Maker. As a developer who specializes in visual novels and interactive fiction, I like to be, at the very least, passingly familiar with the engines available and being used. My go-to's are Ren'Py, of course, for visual novels, and Twine for interactive fiction, but I've made a point to understand what goes into making games with Tyranno, or Inkle, or Light.vn, just in case I, for some reason, need to work with these engines one day.

So, imagine my surprise when I discover Enterbrain also made a handful of visual novel, or at least visual novel-adjacent engines. These, unsurprisingly, given the interest in OELVN's at the time, never got so much as a fan translation in English, and so even more unsurprisingly, barely anyone seems to have heard of them. The most interesting to me are Ren'Ai Maker and Ren'Ai Maker 2, but there are some more fun things I want to cover here.

Starting off, we have Sound Novel Tsukuru for the Super Famicom. RPG Maker also had entries on the Super Famicom, so this isn't super out of the ordinary, but it really tickles me that there is a dedicated visual novel creation tool available for the SF. Copies of this one are also easily found, which is nice; I'm looking forward to poking around this one, then hopefully I'll have some more to say about it.

Sound Novel Tsukuru 2 followed, released for the PlayStation and the Sega Saturn; this one is also really easy to find, and comes with a demo game, Graduation Certificate.

Then, in 1999, we got Ren'Ai Simulation TKool, or Ren'Ai Simulation Game Maker, or as I'm going to call it for brevity, Ren'Ai Maker. This one came out for PC, and according to rpgmakerofficial.com's wonderful history page, is described as "the very first romance adventure / visual novel typed maker! This software was praised for featuring a Time Manager / Calendar system to make romance novel game creation easy. The Character Montage editor for female characters allowed the user to generate heroines of their preferred type and had a good collection of assets to make a compelling romance game." The "Character Montage Editor" mentioned was apparently expanded upon in 2001's Ren'Ai Simulation TKool 2, allowing the generation of male characters, too, which "allowed the making of games beyond romance novels".

Ren'Ai Maker 1 & 2 are pieces of software that I would absolutely kill to get my hands on, but it's difficult enough finding information on them simply existing, let alone copies of the actual programs; the closest I came were pages on rpgcrisis.net (1 & 2). I also found this video showing off making a game with Ren'Ai Maker, and what a finished game looks like:

I really wish I had a better grasp on Japanese, because I reckon that'd make finding a copy of either one a lot easier, but as it stands, I'll just have to yearn for the time being.

There are some other neat things I learned about from the rpgmakerofficial.com history page, and other miscellaneous searches and websites I stumbled upon, like the numerous art and design programs such as drawing and 3D modelling software, PataPata Anime TKool, a monochrome flipbook animation tool for the PC-98 with a colour sequel, Shoga TKool, a calligraphy program with some fancy sounding realistic brush effects, the Ongaku TKool series of music creation tools for the PC-98, Super Famicom, Windows, and PlayStation, and, most curiously to me, Screensaver TKool 95, a dedicated screensaver creation program, featuring some really, really cute art on the packaging and in the manual. Best of all, Screensaver Tkool 95 is up on archive.org!

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