It is said that every 100 years, a small fishing village on the southern coast of an unknown fantasy realm holds a magical artisanal cheese festival. As an adventurer and fan of ethically produced dairy products, you are determined to attend the fabled event, arriving at the dock on a small boat with only a few gold coins and a dream. This is the backdrop to the worst role-playing adventure I have ever experienced and, entirely coincidentally, the only one I have ever designed.The game creation package RPG Maker has been around since 1992, the first version launching on the Japanese PC-98 computer. Since then, development has been passed from veteran software publisher ASCII to Enterbrain and then Chiyoda-based Gotcha Gotcha Games, and dozens of instalments have appeared. Although it has become increasingly complex over the years, RPG Maker remains a remarkably intuitive way to make adventure games with no development experience at all.The package comes with thousands of pre-made maps, buildings, characters and items, which creators can use and modify; but you can also start from scratch, crafting your own assets to make unique games. Your projects can be shared with the RPG Maker community and several acclaimed indie games have been built with the program, including To The Moon, Corpse Party and Omori. I can tell you that Artisan Cheese Quest will not be joining them.An exclusive screenshot of Artisan Cheese Quest on RPG Maker. Photograph: NIS AmericaTo be fair, the game only took me and my 19-year-old son Zac about two hours to make, using the PlayStation 5 version of RPG Maker (launching on 21 February). At first we chose the Swamp location from the huge variety of pre-made maps, which mostly offer traditional fantasy and sci-fi options. Then we selected a character a cute little anime-style warrior. From here you start the actual process of making a game that offers challenging things to do. Everything that takes place in the world is called an Event, and to create one you need to construct a set of conditions using a very simple visual programming language.If youve ever tried Scratch, the popular coding tool used in schools throughout the world, youll be right at home. Say you want to hide a magic key in a treasure chest: you place the chest on the map, then use the menu system to place a key inside it. Add a locked door then place a condition on that door: if the player has the key, the door opens, if they dont, they get a fail message.With the same system, you can add branching dialogue with characters, plan enemy patrol paths and eventually craft a combat system everything is controlled via a series of if/then commands. During lockdown, Zac and I used Scratch to make a very simple maze game where you guided a mouse towards a block of cheese, so we decided to stick with our established game design expertise here. We built a tavern, attached the tavern interior to a building on the main landscape map, added characters to provide hints and hid an artisan cheese festival pass in a treasure chest on a small island. We didnt use any original assets but we did write all the dialogue and the story i.e. find the pass, open the tavern door, eat cheese. Please keep us in mind for this years Bafta games award for best narrative.RPG Maker on PlayStation 5. Photograph: NIS AmericaMost importantly, the process was enormous fun. Youre able to select background music and sound effects, and going for wildly inappropriate options had us crying with laughter: we put very dramatic combat music in the most innocuous areas; our treasure chest screamed when you opened it; villagers randomly barked and growled. And however basic the final result is, you still get that thrill at having made something that functions and looks a lot like an actual game. As you get used to the system, your ambitions grow: we later added a zombie who wanders around the map complaining about his lactose intolerance.Im not going to lie although the system is intuitive, it gets extremely demanding when you start thinking about creating multi-stage boss encounters or designing a levelling up system for your character. If youre not used to working with lengthy routines and sub-routines and game mechanics that all mess with each other, youve a long road ahead. True, any time we werent sure how to make something work, the games online community helped: there are hundreds of videos on YouTube and lots of helpful people on Reddit. But I feel were some way from making anything even slightly resembling a commercial game.Perhaps at some point in the future, Artisan Cheese Quest will be one of the finest fromage-based fantasy role-playing adventures available on PlayStation 5. For now, were just going to keep adding stupid sound effects until it stops being funny. Honestly, dont hold your breath.