IT is said to host a magical artisan cheese festival every 100 years, a small fishing village on the south coast of an unknown fantasy realm. As an ethically produced dairy adventurer and fan, you decide to take part in the legendary event and arrive at the dock of a small boat with a few gold coins and dreams. This is the worst role-playing adventure background I've ever experienced, and by chance it's the only one I've ever designed.

The game-making package RPG maker has been around since 1992, the first version to be released on Japanese PC-98 computers. Since then, development has been handed over from veteran Japanese developer ASCII to Enterbrain and then to Chiyoda-based Gotcha Gotcha games, with dozens of installments coming up. Although it has become increasingly complicated over the years, RPG makers have no development experience and remain a very intuitive way to make adventure games.

The package comes with thousands of pre-built maps, buildings, characters and items that creators can use and modify. But you can also start from scratch and create your own assets and create unique games. Your project can be shared with the RPG maker community, and several highly acclaimed indie games have been programmed into the program, including To the Moon, Corpse Party, and Omori. Artisan Cheese Quest can tell you not to participate in them.

To be fair, the game only took me and my 19-year-old son Zac, using the PlayStation 5 version of RPG Maker (released February 21st). Initially, we chose swamp locations from many types of ready-made maps. It mainly offers traditional fantasy and sci-fi options. Then we chose the characters – cute little anime style warriors. From here we begin the actual process of creating a game that offers challenging things. Everything that takes place in the world is called events and is necessary to create the events necessary to build a set of conditions using a very simple visual programming language.

If you've tried Scratch, a popular coding tool used in schools around the world, you're probably at home. Suppose you want to hide the magic key in the treasure chest: Place your chest on the map and place the key inside using the menu system. Add a locked door and then place the state on that door. If the player has a key, the door will open.

Using the same system, you can add branch dialogs with characters, plan enemy patrol passes, and ultimately create a combat system. During lockdown, Zack and I used scratch to create a very simple maze game, where we led the mouse towards a block of cheese, so we stuck to the game design expertise established here. I've done it. They built a tavern, installed the tavern interior to the main landscape map building, added characters to provide hints, and hidden artisan cheese festival passes in a small island treasure chest. We didn't use the original assets, but we wrote all the dialogue. The story – find the pass, open the tavern door, eat cheese – was completely ours. Remember us for the best narratives of this year's BAFTA Games Award.

Most importantly, this process was very enjoyable. I was able to choose background music and sound effects and cried with laughter in search of very inappropriate options. Our treasure chest cried out as you opened it. The villagers barked randomly and groaned. And no matter how basic the end result is, you still get that thrill of making something that works and looks like a real game. Once you get used to the system, your ambitions grow: we later added zombies wandering around the map complaining about his lactose intolerance.

I'm not going to lie – the system is intuitive, but it gets Very Requests when you start thinking about creating a multi-stage boss encounter or designing a character leveling system. If you don't deal with game mechanics where long routines, subroutines, or game mechanics are confused with each other, then there's a long way to go. Certainly, whenever we didn't know how to make something work, the online gaming community helped us. There are hundreds of videos on YouTube, and there are many helpful people on Reddit. But we feel that it's some way from making something a little more similar to commercial games.

Perhaps at some point in the future, Artisan Cheese Quest will be one of the best Fromage-based fantasy role-playing adventures available on the PlayStation 5. For now, I'm going to continue adding stupid sound effects until they become interesting. Honestly, don't hold your breath.