Thoughts on RAGs?

[BBReady]

Hello, all. I'm an inspiring creator on this forum, and I wanted to ask the general pop what your opinion on the RAGs game engine is, if you even know what it is. For those that don't, it's basically this kinda of clunky but very convenient and useful game engine that allows you to make Interactive Fiction games without having to code at all -- all the coding is done for you already. The main downside is that you have to pay to use the full version of the designer (you don't have to pay to play RAGs games, just to make them), but you can download a free trial version from the website (ragsgame.com) if you want to play around with it and see what's up.

It's just that I've started production of my game recently with this engine after going through several options, and I've wondered why I personally haven't seen more of it in the porn game community. For instance, as far as I know, there is no RAGs game on this forum, and the only two I've really ever even heard of are Wife Trainer and Cursed. I know that I've read that RAGs is popular for making adult games, but, in the adult game spheres I'm in, I don't really see it come up. I mean, yes, it is made for interactive fiction, but it allows you to put images into your game if you want, so it's not like it's for games that are solely text-based.

For those of you that know about RAGs, what do you think about it? Has it just not gained enough steam to become popular for making games? Is there something wrong with the engine? I'm curious. From my experience playing RAGs games and using the designer to start my own game, it seems like a quality engine for making adult games. I just can't see why it isn't more popular unless it's because it's not well-known enough; and, if that's the case, maybe this post can help that.

[x3Darkie]

I've got a few theories myself. One, aside from Ren'Py, I feel like RAGS is the easy-to-use/beginner/amateur "text" (air quotes because as you said, RAGS is image capable) game engine of RPG Makers. Two, humans are intrinsically heavily dependent on visuals. The easiest example I could give is given a choice of multiple games, most people are almost always drawn to the one best looking box-art. Hence that is why effectively 99% of this forum's games whether flash or non-flash is graphical in nature. Heck, even the ones making visual novels spend a lot of time and effort on the visual part. That's why people are using RPG Maker or Ren'Py over RAGS. People just like pretty looking things. Three, RAGS have clunky and unintuitive controls. And also terribly laid out UI elements. This is debatable, but I'd take RPG Maker or Ren'Py's default UI over RAGS any day.

But going back to my first theory, RAGS and RPG Maker is good for starting out, but if you're looking to do more advanced stuff you'd have to come up with workarounds and spending a lot of time configuring your events to do things the engine isn't meant to do. At which point you might as well just make your game on Unity, Unreal or even write your own in-house engine.

[Trninja2]

I'm guessing the same could be said for gamemaker studio.

[AcademyOfFetish]

What I don't like about RAGS is you have to download the player separately. To me that's a huge barrier to entry for someone who wants to play your game. The rags website does not make it as easy as possible to find. That means someone has to REALLY want to play your game to give it a shot.