@BlinkRape good thing about architect is that the dev is super active and responsive, and once you buy it you don't have to pay royalties for your games or anything like that. I do wish there was a demo though because $50 is pretty steep just to try it out.

I could realistically learn how to code my own thing, but I always go back to the fact that something like rpg maker already has pretty much everything there and I just need to tweak it, whereas something like Godot means that I would be doing it all from scratch. You can kind of do 3D stuff in RPG Maker too, but it's easier to do in Architect. The entire source code for the game itself is available in RPG Maker, even if the user interface isn't, so it makes it easy-ish to still change things I don't like or need to be different. Especially with community-made plug-ins.

It's a matter of, you know, I have so many games I want to make and so many stories to tell, but so little time to do it. Learning so many different things and then applying them all from scratch is daunting. Plus, rpg maker is in itself a little niche and filling that instead of following the crowd with ps1 horror still seems cool to me. I know I could technically get something better or more ideal with a different engine though, so that's sort of the dilemma.