this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2023
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Programming
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Assuming RPG maker 2003 isn't vastly different to whichever version I was playing around with way back when, then it is a good tool to make a very specific type of game (ie, a classic 2D jRPG) reasonably easily.
That could make it a perfect tool to get your feet wet or one that will actually cause you grief.
If what excites you about making a game is building a world, populating it with people and enemies for your player to interact (and battle with), writing character dialogue to tell a story, designing playable characters that level up their stats over time and you like 2D jRPGs, then find a couple of resources that teach the RPG Maker basics and dive in.
If you're more interested in creating a variety of different types of games right away and you're interested in the technical puzzle of how to actually make things happen in a game and designing your own solutions then you may want to try going in a different direction, either of learning programming in a more general sense or just diving in and learning as you working with a more versatile game development engine that does less of the groundwork for you.
Any of those approaches are equally valid, it really just depends on your own preferences and what you are hoping to achieve. There's also nothing wrong with trying out a few different things until you find the right approach for you.
Personally, I found RPG maker to be too narrow for me as I spent a lot of time trying to force it to do things it wasn't specifically designed to make easy to do, so didn't really make progress until I moved to a more flexible engine (in my case, I use Godot, the FOSS game engine) and I've found I really need to combine general study of the technology, with following some tutorials and just working on my own small projects to figure things out as I go, in order to make progress. Other people find they need to stick to a single learning technique at a time and prefer to learn using software that gives them a little less creative freedom but makes the process easier to get going with.
Do you know what it is about making games that appeals to you? Do you have specific goals in mind? (It's ok if you aren't sure of the answers to those questions, but the more you can tell us about where you're coming from, the better we can offer specific advice.)
Edit: quick note to be clear as I didn't notice your comment about your PC not running Unreal or Unity. Godot is a similar piece of software to those but is much more likely to run on your PC, so if you are thinking you want to try that style of game development software then definitely give it a go (you just might have to make sure you set the renderer to one of the lower end modes. I appreciate that probably sounds like meaningless jargon right now. The renderer is essentially the bit of your game engine that actually puts together the graphics. You can choose which of a few different ones to use. Some of them are easier to run and have wider compatibility, others are harder to run, have narrower compatibility, but have additional features. In Godot, you can easily choose between them both for within your Godot project and separately for the actual final produced game. Can't remember which is which right now as it all got changed around for the recent major update but you'll likely recognise what it is and have clear information in the app when you get to that point.)