I’ve got an idea for a VN-like, choose-your-own-story kind of game in which you go in a lab that’s developing some sort of “super-food” that can instantly saciate someone’s hunger, greatly enhances one’s capability to gain weight both in certain parts of the body as well as generally, and muscle building as well 'cause I also love the kind of woman that can kick my ass.
But anyways, my intentions with the game are to make a story driven game akin to both Forks and Worshippers of the Gain in terms of gameplay, but with a character creator and adapting CGs depending of your choice of character and if certain milestones are met depending on the “route” you take.
Thing is, I know as much of game engine stuff and programing as my username implies, so if anyone could enlighten me with at least which game engine to use, I can try to figure out how to make it work (and be eternally grateful to you, of course).
For a VN I would suggest renpy. The fact that you do “code” in it can drive some people off but the scripting language in it is modeled closer to writing a screen play then actual legit programing so its actually quite easy for non-programmers to pickup.
The right one for you really depends on the look and feel your going for considering you picked two renpy games as examples, it seems you have already have a disposition towards it.
While twine, renpy, and rpgmaker, and many others im not naming don’t require you to know how to program in a programing language and some offer visual tools to make the script or game. In the end they all require learning effetely their scripting language or tool to “program” your game. The more advanced effects and things you try to do the further down the rabbit hole of programing you go. Each have limitations imposed by the engine, or its scripting language, or tool(not that you cannot work around it).
Since my game Bob is built on renpy like Forks and Worshippers of the Gain, i can give you some insight into what i consider the pros and cons of renpy are. Fist as a simple click through visual novel engine to display text with pictures renpy is fantastic, keeping things extremely simple. Even going a little more complex with a chose your own adventure to track choices with simple variables is made very easy with minimal knowledge of the renpy script and python which its based off, is needed. Assuming you wanna get more complex your going to need far more knowledge of the renpy scrip which is quite extensive. Because renpy supports programing your game directly in python. Outside of calls to the render engine programing of the game itself, allows for the sky being the limit. See the the pong demo made in renpy in the sdk kit. The biggest con of renpy from my experience is the fact that its script is totally geared towards visual novels so while you could totally make a rpgmaker’esk game in it, it would require you to know a good bit of python(renpy variables are python variables so, you do have to know some python) and have a good grasp on logic and flow to be able to make what rpgmaker already delivers which is an engine entirely focused on a Pokémon style rpg game. My game while using the renpy engine is unlike Forks and Worshippers of the Gain in that a lot of it is written in python, and its control flow deviates from what you see in a lot of renpy games(1.4 the current posted version not so much as my work in progress where most of the renpy script has been thrown out for direct programing in python to completely customize the flow.)
Adding my vote for Ren’py too. It’s pretty easy to use (if I can write a game in it then anyone can!) and has the great advantage of being free It also comes with a pretty good in-built tutorial.
So, you’ve got nothing to lose. Download it, and see if you like it. And, with it being free, there are masses of help pages, etc. out there if you get stuck.
I think I’ll go with Ren’py then. From your recommendations and from what I’ve seen so far in the tutorial, it is indeed intuitive and easy to use! Thnaks, everyone : D
It also comes with a pretty good in-built tutorial.