I spend a lot of time looking at Unity assets (part of my tech fetish) -probably only second to reading translations. Originally I tried to do everything myself but it's very time consuming to do that. It's also not to say that these assets are easy to use. Unity uses C# and JS. If you just want to build a very basic tile based game you can try HTML 5 with JS. There are tutorials out there that move sprites around on a grid background. I went through one about a year back. You can also find sprite maker tools online that make little humanoid figures with different looks in the RPGMaker style. Combine the two, and you can make a basic game.
All my designs are steeped in visual novel varieties. Some are more tactical or action oriented than others but generally, my designs involve story-based progressions. Unfortunately, I don't have much time to relearn programming (it's been 10 years since I last programmed anything other than simple HTML), so progress has been slow. Right now I'm just refining the ideas so that it will be easier for me to program when I do have the skills to do so. Although most of my game design ideas are JRPG, I do have some action oriented games as well, such as the one in this topic. It's my latest idea that popped up as I woke up and I had to write it down before it kills my mood to do anything else. However, this one is fairly ambitious and although I planned on writing it in Unity, that will be several years in the future as I have not made any game in Unity yet so far. If you're willing to work together, then I believe we can start on simpler stuff. My simpler ideas would certainly be niche. Yes, the avatar is in 3D, but what is 3D Custom Girl? Is it a 3D modelling program? I've worked with Poser 5.0 too back in the day, but I was not really fond of it. So far, the only game engines I've worked with are Construct 2 and Game Salad, those newbie engines. I abandoned the idea of using Unity for my games before this because I wanted my games to be light on the system and I aim to port it to mobile and make money through ads and in-app purchases. With the game I linked here though, I have to use Unity as Construct 2's multiplayer system is kind of limited in scope. Without multiplayer capability, the game will die very quickly. I totally understand your worry about being distracted. I've been distracted too, that's why I haven't managed to learn much for the past year.
Well i don't want to build a simple tiled game but rather a game like FF Tactics or pokemon explorer (strangely sounds like the name of a browser xD) But with more features, as there would be 3 different tiled map (each having a different scale in the game) and a majority of the terrain procedurally generated. Add to that the humongous quantity of skills and their different visual effects i have in mind plus the fact that i want some cinematics... yeah i'm nowhere near creating this game. Duh for me everything else than programming and science bore me to no end and could'nt pass a day without thinking about it or wanting to work on it X/
I wish I could make a game but I have tried twitch on Ren'py but I don't seem to understand how Ren'py works. Here it's my idea, should I be able to understand how Ren'py works. Name: I can't think of a title RPG or non RPG: Non RPG, it's a Visual Novel with dating sim element and life sim. Info: it's like Sims games but in high school, you get choice to be a girl or boy and customisation them as well choice their personalty and you have chance to decorate their house. You can get work, for to buy your own house and you can learn to cook in cooking class, you can attend class or get choice to skip them but I would not anbefale that since your population would drop and your chance for to get yourself boyfriend/girlfriend would drop as well. You can do many activities in the game and you can get married and have children. The game would have relationship Chart and population status. More popular you are better work can you get but low population would you get fired from work and you would be alone. Commercial or non commercial: free Platform: PC and Steam Multiplayer or non multiplayer: Multiplayer since you get choice to play with other people.
When making games (amongst other things), it is often advisable to consider the minimum viable unit. This is the idea that your game should be represented by a core concept or game play. For example Mario at its core is about running around and jumping on things. A demo or prototype should be made around this concept to validate the feel of the game before considering too many bells and whistles. You want to prove the basic premise is interesting enough to go further. For your space opera RTS I imagine VN style exposition with RTS segments in between. I'm not sure what kind of multiplayer you envision -I take it's more PvP and less coop? You might want to place the multiplayer on the back burner if you don't have a clear vision right now -for example if you just want multiplayer mainly for lasting appeal. I personally think a lot could be done with coop multiplayer but that's an aside. At this stage you might want to consider a basic prototype in Unity with maybe Fungus (https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/34184) for the VN part, and a simple RTS engine asset (there's a couple that are fairly cheap like https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/62543 and https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/60079). I've played around with Fungus before but I have not tried either RTS asset -although I might pick up the second one. Choose some part of the storyline and then see if you can build a proof of concept in a week or so. The art can just be temporary placeholders like stick figures and boxes for now. I tend to work best and be most productive when I have a bounded time deliverable. It helps me from becoming too distracted and reduces analysis paralysis. 3D Custom Girl was a hentai game that people have been using to generate game art with because it has a character customized and poser. I have some version of Poser but haven't really used it much like a large number of other tools that I've bought over time. Currently I'm actively working with a Japanese developer who is making a character designer asset for Unity. I'm really into character generation/customization. Now today I WILL get my sword tracking done! Focus focus...
Problem with using Unity assets is that they rarely work together. Often times, you end up creating a game that is too big and demanding for even a simple game because you lose performance when you use different assets together. That's why Unity games are mostly very heavy on the hardware and suffer from memory leaks when they don't have to be. Mostly the fault lies in people who don't know programming mixing and matching different asset sets together, but the assets themselves could sometimes be the problem. That's why I've been using Construct 2 so far. It does have some ready-made coding by other users but they're all something you can see on the programming sheet, so if something doesn't work, you can tweak it easily. So far I've been programming things myself but I'm generally lazy and even when I'm not lazy, I'm busy, so things haven't progressed much. As for the multiplayer thing, it's essential. The game needs lasting presence if it is to make a profit. Japanese visual novel makers can make profit despite having so many pictures is because their production cost is much lower. Manga artists are plentiful there and they can just hire a 14 year old school boys to draw their hentai at very low cost. That means, as long as the game is interesting, they can make low budget games and make lots of profit even without multiplayer support. Here, artists charge a god damn lot. So you spend a lot of money on images. If you don't recoup the losses with lasting presence of some sort such as good multiplayer support, you will be working at a loss. You won't make profit, you make debts instead.
Yeah, Unity assets often don't play well together. I spend a fair amount of time upgrading Unity and then fixing asset bugs in my projects. Models, animations, music and sound though work fairly well across projects but you get a mix of art styles. I've probably sunk just shy of 2k into Unity assets at this point. Originally I started to learn Blender, PSP, Inkscape, etc. to do the graphics myself but it was really time consuming with rather mediocre results. So I guess I went to the completely opposite spectrum. I have yet to release anything commercially yet, and I'm thinking about sinking another $1200 into a mocap system. I have demoed a prototype at a venture cafe, and have another demo scheduled at a shooting range next week but it's more for feedback than angel investors :< I think I have Construct 2. It's for 2D only games right? Never really considered doing anything 2D because of the art requirements. I've dabbled in Spriter and have some interest in Dragonbones but I can't draw at all. As you pointed out 2D artists are not cheap here (presumably you mean in an English speaking country like US/UK/AU/CA). Oh, I wanted to add that despite potential performance issues with Unity assets, it's very unlikely a general developer will make a better core engine in any reasonable amount of time. For example although I've programmed in C# for a long time, I would never attempt to code a RTS or RPG engine from scratch except as a learning excercise.