izigame.me

TLDR: Highly recommended for someone who knows nothing about making a video game and wants to learn.
Long version:
I started working on my first title "The Great Gaias" back on RPG Maker VX.
Knowing nothing about video game design, it was very easy to create maps and NPCs to interact with. This ease of use is what I believe allowed me to stick with it and get better at learning the underlying systems.
Once MV came out we began a six month endeavor of transferring The Great Gaias over to this new (at the time) engine.
By this time I knew my way around more complicated systems built into the game engine and had learned some Python from using scripts in VX.
To us, MV was a big improvement over VX (we never used Ace) and after over 3,000 hours on MV we finally released The Great Gaias, a massive game with over 100 hours of content. Probably not the first kind of project a neophyte game designer should take on but because of the tools available in RPG Maker we were able to pull it off.
Now my second title "Gjallarhorn" is nearing release and I have over 6,000 hours in MV. I've been able to create much more complex systems, maps and even know a decent amount of JavaScript.
But this is also where the limitations of RPG Maker have started to really hold us back. Because of how big "The Great Gaias" and "Gjallarhorn" are the engine just wasn't able to handle these types of massive games. The engine would often crash as we neared the end of our development of TGG, so we had to save very frequently.
TGG took seven years to develop and only began crashing often during the last year of development and only after using the engine for around an hour. Unfortunately, after only one year of developing Gjallarhorn the engine started crashing around every 5-10 minutes making development almost impossible. Because of this, we were thinking of scrapping the whole project and starting over in a new game engine.
Luckily with the help of a forum member who was also close to giving up because of this same problem we worked together to find a solution.
Besides the engine crashing issues it has also been a pain in the neck trying to optimize things just so our game doesn't run at low fps or stutter. We've even had to dumb down some enemy AI just because it would become to stressful on the battle system.
Now don't get me wrong I whole heartily think any new person who wants to jump into game design should definitely try out RPG Maker. But if you are already a developer or have more than a basic knowledge of game design I would look elsewhere.
Once "Gjallarhorn" is finished we will be moving on to a more advanced game engine.
I do want to thank the developers of RPG Maker for taking me on this decade long journey of learning game design and I hope many more people get as much out of this engine as I did.
Cheers!