Rhythos RPG Builder announced

Rhythos RPG Builder is a free, open source RPG creation program “inspired by RPG Maker” being developed by David Maletz.

Indeed, Rhythos seems aimed right at the RPG Maker demographic, with an accessible interface and built-in support for both visual event scripting (for those who don’t want to code) and direct code access (for more advanced users). Maletz writes: “New game developers will be able to make their first games in Rhythos and grow, while experienced game developers will find a lot of flexibility and extendability to create what they want!”

It’s not just an open source RPG Maker clone, though. Some of the things that make it stand out:

• It’s cross-platform: you can make Windows, Mac and Linux builds of your game, or even build a Flash version that will deploy to browser. (Maletz has indicated that building to HTML5, iOS, Android, and Ouya may end up being possible as well.)
• It supports coding in HaXe, which is sort of a do-everything wonder-language.
• It’s easy to extend; the program supports plug-ins to extend it with “more export targets, battle systems, assets, and much more.”

Rhythos currently uses a real-time combat system with exclusively one-on-one fights; there’s a demo posted showcasing that system, which I gave a few minutes of my time yesterday. It’s not entirely to my taste, to be honest (particularly so because the characters currently lack visual cues that would allow me to easily establish a successful rhythm of attacking and defending). Luckily, however, Maletz confirms that a proper turn-based battle system will be coming to the software in a future version.

Rhythos is still early in development, but there’s already a video up already showing off some rather impressive map editing capabilities:

Now, although it might seem odd for me to be posting about Rhythos two days after its Kickstarter failed, Maletz has confirmed to me that development is going to continue despite it not reaching the funding goal. He writes:

Right now, my plan is to continue expanding the community and keeping the current backers interested, and continue working on Rhythos on the side until I have a runnable demo people can try (hopefully by early next year). Then, my plan is to start another campaign next year, and hope with the expanded community, the demo, and more interesting backer rewards, it’ll have a higher chance of success.

So development is going to take him a while, in other words, but this project strikes me as quite promising. I’ll be keeping an ear to the ground on this one.