Post

Unity and such has a ton of free assets that you can use either for your finished product or for placeholders til you manage to make the assets yourself for your game, if they don't quite fit the vib your going for see if the license let's you edit them! opengameart and itch.io are also great

itch.ioDownload the latest indie gamesitch.io is a simple way to find, download and distribute indie games online. Whether you're a developer looking to upload your game or just someone looking for something new to play itch.io has you co...

Places for getting asset packs, please keep in mind a lot of assets are either 2d pixel art style or 3d models since those are the easiest to modify. There are a ton more sites too, those are just the two that come off the top of my head

More emphasis should be put on the fact that being able to write complex code shouldn't be a prerequisite to being able to create games. As long as you aren't stealing assets or code, I'm all for no-code solutions to game dev

I looked through some replies and I didn't see anyone mention Ink by Inkle Studio. ( I may have missed it!) Inkle Studio made 80 days, heaven's vault, etc and they have their own text based engine that you need minimal learning of their custom text based code to get started in a text game

which is obviously great for writers that don't want to draw. you would need to implement ink into another engine if you want all the other bits besides the text, but if you're just doing text I think it's a more robust and flexible engine than twine. We're using ink to make our game!

godot was the 3rd (?) engine I worked in and it is genuinely hostile to beginners oh my God. I love godot now, after 2 years of hard work, but everything about it is anathema to a beginner. you can't even follow tutorials online unless you're using the exact old version of godot the tutorial used

I totally agree about hostile to beginners! I *really* wanted to use Godot, but it felt so heavily oriented towards people who are already developers. And they built their no-code version (which is discontinued now IIRC) by asking what coders thought it should look like! I just gave up in the end.

if rpg maker and gdevelop aren't your thing, probably scratch gamengine / make code arkade might fit? some start with mobile apps first, like buildbox or game builder garage for switch

honestly I think its still important to mention the engines that require you coding in this thread. people will have fun using the simpler engines and then eventually want to make more complex games, they should know where to start from then :)

In my case, I started picking up Gamemaker Studio again after playing around with Tyranobuilder and finding some things I wanted to do being a bit too advanced for the program. Past couple years I've gone from not being able to code at all to having written up an entire dialogue system from scratch!

as nice as it is seeing people excited to make games... I don't want people stuck making the same damn games as each other. i encourage you all to learn or get a programmer and let go of these template engines. it will seem hard but if you really want to make art you have to put in the effort!

i think its fine as a starting point but I think everyone's unique ideas and creativity will truly show if they liberate themselves from these game engines that do everything for them. thats all i want to say, i mean no hostility. have fun game deving!

Renpy is pretty intimidating at first, so for beginners I really recommend checking out the tutorial that it comes with and studying / borrowing straight from that code (you can see inside those files, yup! and everything else!)

I think just like OP says, the best thing to start with is small. Character enters a room, has a conversation. If you feel defeated, remember a strong story comes first when it comes to a visual *novel*. Look into old classics, stalk around steam and the Reddit. Youโ€™ll be encouraged by your peers :)

All that to say, if youโ€™re scared of coding, start small. Donโ€™t even make choices yet, just a straightforward story. Then go back, add in transitionsโ€ฆ so-on-so-forth. You can always go back! (End of this thread lol, sorry!!!)

Heres a few I can vouch for RPG Paper Maker - Mode7/Paper Mario RPG maker. No 3Dexperience needed. Dev is wonderful. 001 Game Creator - Godot and RPG maker had a codeless baby. Very powerful. Can do light maps and even 3D. Tools are robust/not catered to a single genre.

Tyrano Builder - (Personal opinion here) the cleaner version of RenPy. Pixel GameMaker MV - Made by the RPG maker people. Can make any game but specializes in games that have parallax scrolling and physics (as opposed to RPG maker that specializes in top-down game play.)

thank you so much for sharing! with my bachelor project around the corner and the most bare bones coding skills, you might have just saved my life ๐Ÿฅน

๐Ÿ“Œ As someone who made a visual novel once - which already has very little coding, it's crazy how little anyone wants to help u. They'll rather mock u, & tell you to learn coding first. Like why can't we game dev-beginner's have some kind of training wheels? We'll learn in time but not without help

It seems to me that there's an assumption of a skill floor, i.e. that you possess certain fundamentals to start which is why most things require tutorials because documentation is designed around "this is what you can do" rather than "this is how you do this thing".

Furthermore, the concept of "training wheels" doesn't entirely make sense in this context. At some point, if you want to do more advanced game mechanics, you'll have to learn coding so you're only putting off what you could be doing now.

All I wanted was to do a visual novel, though. And I looked information, googled and worked my butt off but none of the guides explain the process, and it's very technical language which is hard for non-native English speakers. But the mocking when I got stuck was the worst about the entire thing

Hey, quick question: I've been thinking of making a game in the style of a MacVenture series (Shadowgate, Deja Vu), what would you recommend? I have a little experience in Godot and Ren'Py, but am open to suggestions.

Game Maker Studio 2 with some plug-ins would probably be your best bet. I would look into peoples text adventure tutorials and go from there. If you dont wanna shell out you could try Adventure Game Studio. Its a bit clunky. Not intuitive for what you want but closer than other engines.

Yet another option is to ask me for collaboration, I can code, even have my own pixelart-optimized engine with software synths, you just need to provide me design, graphics, music (?), and regular messages whether I'm working on this project or not.

hey look, the post that make me buy RPG maker! from the person who got me to buy 2 plushies, 2 games, 2 artbooks and inadvertently a lot of art supplies, ma'am you're bankrupting me

I'd like to suggest looking at enginesdatabase.com where you can look at and filter through a lot of different game engines by various features (2D/3D, Visual Scripting vs Coding, etc) and genres (Platformers, RPGs, etc) to find an engine that may work best for your game idea and skill level.

Iโ€™ve got my hands full lately but I do have a game project in pursuing, Iโ€™m definitely gonna have to check this out soon!!๐Ÿฅฐ๐Ÿ’ Thank you for sharing ๐Ÿ’๐Ÿ’๐Ÿ’๐Ÿ’๐Ÿ’๐Ÿ’‹๐Ÿ’‹๐Ÿ’‹๐Ÿ’‹๐Ÿ’‹