Basically what the title says. I have some ideas drafted out for a game, including basic gameplay loop and mechanics, but I’m also a total beginner and not sure how to best realize these ideas. Not really looking for anyone to necessarily spoonfeed me, but maybe just point me in the way of where to look to begin building a game along these parameters. I’ve looked at RPG-Maker, and I don’t think it’s really what I’m looking for, and Twine seems promising but I thought I’d ask for advice before I dive in.
Here’s a link to a google doc with what I have so far for the game, if anyone wants to take a look.
It largely depends on what exactly you want the game to play like. If you just want a text game then Twine can be good but navigating multiple menus and sub-menus can easily become quite clunky, and you’ll likely be relying a lot on your descriptions of the monster girls when you inspect them. There’s nothing stopping you from using images of course, but there’d still have to be some description as the rest of the game would be text based. Would be quite strange going through all the text to then hit Inspect and just have an image show up.
Unity is quite a versatile engine whether you want 2D or 3D, but you will need to know C# in order to make the game. There’s plenty of tutorials online but there’s still a fairly steep learning curve to start out with.
I’ve never used Godot but I have heard quite a lot of positive things about it, it supports both 2D and 3D, multiple coding languages including its own proprietary language, C++ and C#, and has a lot of community made tools and extensions. Obviously there’ll still be a learning curve if you’ve never coded before but I have heard it’s better than Unity for 2D stuff.
It’s definitely going to be primarily text based, I’m a much better writer than than I am an artist. Any art will be a later addition, and most likely AI-based unless I find a willing contributor.
For twine, would it be capable of having random events? As in, the day begins and based on several flags, you have a chance of drawing from a pool of certain events?
Yeah that can be done. I’ve never used Twine but I’ve played multiple games built with it that have random events. The only real difficulty getting management games working with it is the menu navigation I was talking about, if you’ve got to enter and exit multiple pages just to change 1 setting it can get monotonous, otherwise management games work really well with Twine.
Check out Fort of Chains and decide whenever Twine will fits you need.
Random events are nothing else than generating a random number in specified range. I don’t know if Twine has it built-in, but JavaScript has it for sure. Be warned that you will need to learn basics of programming if you need to use JavaScript directly