Ok, so like a lot of people, occasionally I get ideas for games. This time I got an idea that doesn’t sound insanely hard to implement, actually, and maybe I could take a stab at making it. People are making all kinds of games all the time!
I’m thinking 3D, first person. What tools are available for people to make these kinds of games in? I’m not a “programmer,” although I have programmed things and I can learn. I am much less an artist in that I have no experience making 3D models.
We’re talking free tools, here, I’m not made of money. I don’t care if it looks good, at least at first. That whole lo-fi PS1 aesthetic that is going around would be superb. I promise I’m not drunk right now, even though this sounds like exactly the kind of post a drunk person would make.
Our students use Unity a lot, as well as Unreal. Unreal has Blueprints, which allow for a form of visual drag and drop construction of a lot of game loops, though naturally programming skills come in rather handy.
Unity has the lowest barrier to entry. You can also make a lot of mistakes in it that can screw up a project as it grows if you don’t research, but that’s more of an issue for production games. A one person game will be fine.
It’s mostly about the learning resources and availability of assets. Basically means you can use other people’s work to dress up your ideas, and will save tons of time.
Unreal is great, but definitely a harder barrier to enter if you can code slightly competently (Unteals blueprints allow for some stuff to be done easily, but they scale problematic ally without harder coding than Unity’s C# API, imho).
I agree with this completely. I find Unity far harder to use and to learn to script than Godot. I really like the Godot community and there are great resources for it, too.
Unity has always been an entity component system, at least since Unity 2 when it was Max exclusive.
They make a mess of naming things, though. They are “switching” now to a Data Oriented Stack approach that uses a different entity component system (that they are publitishing so hard it seems the ECS is the new approach, but it’s not). But the switch is definitely optional so far and we are several years until it’s fully integrated, I think (and at that point it will be very similar to work with).
Anyway, I don’t think it’s necessarily harder to get into than it was before, if you ignore higher end stuff that is definitely not needed given the OP’s intentions.
I use Gamemaker, but it’s for 2D stuff. I’ll probably move on to other things in time, but for now I’ve learned it well enough (and its scripting language) that I can actually try to do some interesting stuff with it.
If you go with Unity I recommend the following video (and part 2) by Jonas Tyroller. He does a great job of moving quickly but not leaving out any details.
Derpspace will be the first 4x roguelike shmup developed for the Babbage difference engine. It’s hard to code on Jacquard loom punch cards but the user base is too big to ignore.
