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Software / Toolset Recommendations for a Newbie

A topic by MJB created Oct 22, 2021 Views: 353 Replies: 5

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Hello, absolute newbie here looking for a point in the right direction. So, I have a game idea in my head, and just want to know the best toolset to start looking at to start making it real. I want to keep any costs to a minimum (ideally zero whie I'm learning).

I'm aiming to set up and tweak the balance of a 2d world until I can balance it. An island that features monsters, soldiers, civilians, and resources all interacting with eachother automatically.

The idea is that a player would interact vicariously as a God by picking someone to be their champion or chosen one. AI Gods do the same, and the game objective is to use your champion to realise your worshippers' prophecy before the other Gods can achieve theirs.

You do this by spending God-magic to grant your chosen one boons and equipment.

Before all that, for me step 1 is to make a world that just ticks along with Stuff happening. What software will be a good introduction to start building that, with plenty of advice I can Google, and with the potential to be able to layer on all that gameplay stuff later.

(NB: I'm pretty good with putting together the maths to drive balancing from working on tabletop stuff, and I can draw stuff, so won't need a huge pixel art library. I've also got no formal training in game design, but am generally fairly good at picking up stuff from YouTube and old forum posts.)

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Afloof.devModerator2 years ago(+1)

I’m aiming to set up and tweak the balance of a 2d world until I can balance it. An island that features monsters, soldiers, civilians, and resources all interacting with eachother automatically.

This sounds like a lot of content, especially for someone who is learning game development. Ambitious ideas are always good to have, but if you are talking about making your very first game, I would suggest to start really slow and dramatically reduce scope.

Before all that, for me step 1 is to make a world that just ticks along with Stuff happening. What software will be a good introduction to start building that, with plenty of advice I can Google, and with the potential to be able to layer on all that gameplay stuff later.

Pretty much any tool that can be used for game development can do this. Software recommendations are difficult, as they differ depending on taste. You can try out Godot, which is a GUI Game Engine, or you can build everything from scratch using OpenGL. This depends on your programming experience.

A good rule of thumb for first game projects is to make something really simple, like a tic-tac-toe or a pong clone. Working on something more complex while you are building experience, has high potential of creating burnout and discouraging you from finishing the project.

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MJB2 years ago

Thank you - I'll take that advice and start out little - maybe a clone or just a guy standing in a room that keeps getting thirsty, and drinks when he hits a thirstiness limit. As much as anything else, I wanted to make sure I'm not learning a tool that would be an inefficient one to use further down the line.

Last time I went anywhere near making games was the Hammer editor to make old L4D maps, and working out how to make little events happen was probably the closest to programming experience outside of building websites and automating LAN stuff. In any case, GUI-based sounds good.

Appreciate the reply, thank you!

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PaulsGames2 years ago(+1)

I like the game idea, but it's definitely too complex for a beginner project. I'd say you should expect to spend quite some time learning a tool and programming language, creating all kinds of tiny prototypes and smaller games before you can start with such a project.

Regarding tools, I would advise an engine like Godot or Unity. They're accessible and relatively easy to learn, and powerful enough to create a complex project like this. Godot is completely free, and Unity is free until you start to earn lots of money with your games. They both export to many different platforms, including mobile and WebGL. (I don't have experience with Godot myself, though.)

Some alternatives that I would not recommend for this:

-Unreal: geared towards excellent 3d visuals, but overkill for a project like this.

-Lower level programmer tools like C++ & sfml, MonoGame, LibGDX or even C++ & OpenGL/DirectX: it's more work to get up and running, and only good if you (find that you) really like programming and want full control over everything.

-More accessible beginner tools like Game Maker: easy to learn, but I expect you'll run into their limitations if you start to build a complex simulation with lots of interactions. (Game Maker is also not free btw)

-PyGame: with so much of your own code running (for a simulation), you're probably going to run into performance issues.

But I don't have experience with all of these, so I could be wrong. :-) Get some more input too.

Not quite what you describe, but still, here's a cool Unity project, somewhat related:

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PaulsGames2 years ago (2 edits)

This is interesting information too...:

https://itch.io/game-development/engines/most-projects

https://itch.io/game-development/frameworks/most-projects

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MJB2 years ago(+1)

Thank you! Lots of food for thought here. I've taken a crack at Godot so far, and run through some tutorials. I'm still clunking along a little trying to pick up all the terminology and quirks, but getting there.

My aim so far is to keep running through tutorials until I have the skills to be able to create a small aspect of a running sim; perhaps "goodies" "baddies" and "neutrals" nodes that will interact in a simple 2d scene, then practice layering complexity up from there until I'm fluent enough to shoot for what I want.

I'm setting an expectation for myself to have something working in the next year that looks vaguely like it's a part of my initial idea (or whatever that idea has evolved in to like by then).

Programming-wise, I'm still groping around in the dark for the most part, but from what I've seen I think this will start to make sense to me eventually. This whole idea started while I was watching the third series of Britannia, and not being able to shake the concept, I ended up creating this spreadsheet in Google Sheets that simulates combat interactions to sort of exorcise this brain itch I was getting. (Apparently, it wasn't quite enough.!) I'd never really used Excel before, so it took a bit of research. The jump in complexity and what you can achieve in Godot's native language is obviously huge, and looks like it could provide some great system depth, but even taking that in to account, I've found it a lot more impenetrable just to get that initial familiarity going.

Thanks as well for the engine/framework directory views, I'd not thought to look at the choice from that perspective. And that YouTube is exactly the sort of thing I want to learn to build eventually! Even if just for the graphs :D.

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