@rainbowbattlekid The major engines have visual scripting features that you could toy around with to get started. Along with the engines @bloomingbridges listed, I hear Construct‘s great and GameMaker’s an old standby. They've all got established communities with good resources.
@rainbowbattlekid Before my team moved to Godot, I started building the project in Construct 2 because it had an awesome point and click programming interface. I'm not much of a coder, so it was really nice to be able to program via drop down menus and such.
Eventually, you'll want to move onto something more robust, but I think Construct is a good place to start.
Thanks for all the reccs guys! Yeah I'll check this stuff out. I really have NO reference points so this is all helpful.
I'm on a mac fwiw
@rainbowbattlekid Hopefully I‘m not too late to the question, but I’d recommend that you take a look at GameMaker Studio (as @seasons has mentioned above). The code required is pretty lightweight and it‘s got a lot of things built in, like a basic pixel art editor, that will streamline things for you early on. There’s also a ton of tutorials around for making things like a basic platformer. Just about the only drawback is that it costs money (although the pricing seems pretty reasonable).
Unity, on the other hand, is a bit of a pain in the ass to learn, and there are quirks to it that can stop you dead in your tracks.
@Karasu lol I procrastinate and distract myself enough that it's never too late ;)
I can‘t really say what we’re working on because it‘s not announced, but here’s something it wound up NOT being
@rainbowbattlekid as someone who started trying to make video games pretty recently, I would say pico-8 is a great starting point. If you bought the Itch bundle for racial justice then you already own it!
If you do go with pico-8, I’d say start by following this video. You’ll have a really simple video game in 7 minutes and you’ll actually understand how it works, which was really exciting for me when I was first starting, as I have no programming experience and always felt lost following bigger tutorials.
I guess its a flex that my last (and only complete) game is written in Scheme.
(This is me:)
The dev team that I work on just did our first game jam. Yall should check out our submission!!
whoa, this vertical collapse game looks cool!! I'm gonna have to check it out.
I also wanted to share this flex, which is technically somebody else's.
This is someone beating day 999 of our game Gunhouse. We estimated that if you never lost it would take about 280 hours to get to this point. It's really gratifying to see because we've had a lot of reviews of this game where folks said the puzzle system was just "random swiping" because our tutorial didn't explain to them how it worked well enough. But you can see the player here deftly making full-screen blocks, manipulating their positions to get to where they wanted them while also being mindful of the current bonus element etc.
We also had folks saying that the tower defense had no strategy to it. But here you see them use careful timing to block shots, hit flying enemies, etc. But more crucially, a lot of the tower defense strategy is still in the puzzle mode, which is why you'll see them set up a big block, not use it, then slot it in next turn.
The best thing for me was seeing how they didn't actually do things the way I would have. I considered myself to be the person who had played this game the most in the world because of all the dev time I played it. But the habits I fell into were quite different than this player's - they noticed that there are caps on the DPS of a given gun once you get to a certain point, so rather than continuing to load ammo in it, would save it for next round. I would've just loaded it anyway. Likewise they would sometimes just block and not attack because their attack position wasn't optimal, OR to let more enemies get on screen so they could all be hit by a flame special, or similar.
This is my first real experience of seeing people play my game in ways I didn't expect, and it's really cool to see. I also love how they showed their stats at the end (they got to day 8 in survival which is really impressive) - they fired over 2 million shots!! they created almost 8k full-screen blocks!
Anyway. It's really cool to see. I think there are maybe fewer than 10 people that ever got to anywhere approaching this level of devotion with gunhouse, but even reaching a couple people feels like a huge victory for this game.
@Metroplex new to the forum, workin’ on a game boy resolution/color palette playground card battler 
https://twitter.com/thetonewolf/status/1400181003411361794?s=21
@milo I just gave it a quick spin, this was pretty cool!
The music was great, and not at all what I was expecting from a pinball game. Gave me some real end-of-punk-start-of-new-romantic vibes. Joy Division, early Sisters of Mercy, etc. Was that the intent, or am I projecting real hard here? heh
@rejj Hey thanks!! Appreciate you checking it out!!
That's actually my band doing the music with me on bass guitar and one of our programmers on drums... And my only direction to them was that we wanted a "dirty pinball jam" so that's what happened lol.
Had an idea for a game today. It‘s probably been thought of before. I’m writing it down becuase it has potential, it‘s not that memorable or original, and I don’t really have the time to make it.
the idea.
Rogue-like war sim.
the explanation.
Defeat an army in an Alexander the Great-esque battle. Fight hundreds of melee soldiers by controling your soldiers one at a time, NOT AN RTS. The game has a top down view of the battlefield. A soldier is controlled like a GameBoy Zelda (move + slash). The battlefield will have objectives like defeat General X or take control of Structure Y.
the loop
a. A soldier is spawned from the the player‘s base and the player is assigned control.
b. The player moves into the battlefield, the army will attack the soldier if the they enter within an enemies range.
c. The player will die. The game saves the players inputs and creates a “ghost”.
d. A new soldier is spawned from the player’s base and the player is assigned control. All ghost soldiers are spawned alongside the new soldier.
e. The player will die. Return to d until the objective is complete.
f. The player is ranked on how many units used and how long it took to defeat objective.
notes
All the player‘s soldiers will collide with each other (they cannot walk through each other). Adding friendly fire may be interesting.
The enemy army will have long range units, the player might need to be able to block.
Soldiers should have tiny health bars, maybe die within one hit.
It will be interesting to decide what to do with a ghost if their cause of death is avoided. Could blip them out of existence or set them on basic ai eg. follow player soldier or attack closest enemy.
Hopefully players could pull off basic strategies e.g. phalanx formation or leading enemy’s focus to create a gap in a line of soldiers.
Yes, this game was influenced by that mouse game in the flash game thread. I had the basic idea today but only fleshed it out in the past hour.
@beets I think your challenge here is how to make the initial game interesting. sending one soldier off at a time to die could get tedious - if time were more accelerated though, so it‘s almost like you’re “shooting” these soldiers out of your base, that could get interesting maybe. You‘ve got X number of soldiers per scenario, and you send them out in “rounds.” they engage with enemies during that time, and then the next round you do it again, so rather than one at a time, you’re sending out like 5-10 and trying to “shoot” them into strategic areas, and you can sort of build up an army that way. Also if any friendly manages to stay alive they'll get stronger the next round (inexplicably).
and you could shoot archer units off to the side, tanks in front, etc.
Well that's my idea for your idea
https://twitter.com/YoYoGames/status/1410190193685061635?s=20
Game Maker Studio 2 now has an infinite free trial. (You still have to pay for a liscense to release executables). This is a great way to try out game dev if you're interested. The original Game Maker Studio is what got me into game development when my only related skill was making basic pixel art.
Hey, just wanted to update and say that I've released one of those games I was working on. Escape from Terror City is now available on Steam and Itch
@AlecS I‘ve been following you and the development of Escape from Terror City on twitter for a couple of months now and I hadn’t realized that you were also here! My mind did not put together the fact that Alec S. from twitter was the same person as AlecS on here.
Congrats on the release, it looks really good!
@AlecS Well done! I just played through this tonight and had a good time.
In your text boxes I noticed the text was being formatted as it was written. To reveal the text smoothly (if you‘re using Text Mesh Pro) you can use the variable called maxVisibleCharacters. You just set the text to your whole string and set maxVisibleCharacters to 0 and increment it to the text’s character length.
I also noticed some the sensitivity on my aiming was very high at times in level 4. This might have just been lag or was it intentional as it's the Jamming Base?
My favourite fights were the transporter on the train and the Jamming Machine. I liked the bullets that grazed the floor and walking through them as I focused on other projectiles.
Do you build your levels in Unity or do you use another program? I‘d love to make a game in a similar style but I’m unsure how to approach 3D modelling a world/level.
@穴 Thanks!
@beets Thanks! I think the sensitivity issue might be lag. It's definitely not intentional. I make my levels in Blender. Basically for games like this that are tile-based, I make my level geometry basically a grid of (mostly) uniform faces, and then “place” the tiles in the UV editor. I know there are tools you can get like Sprytile and Crocotile that facilitate this style of 3D levels, but those came around after I had already gotten used to my workflow, so I never really picked them up. But if you want to make a game in this style those are probably worth looking into.