Best engine for a menus-and-modules game?

[waxing carnauba]

Hey, y'all!

I've got a game concept in mind (which I've wanted to do for ages), and would like to get started. My "grand plan" is basically a gazillion elements assembled piece-by-piece and then mashed together into a glorious whole.

I'm starting the with irrelevant/extraneous, so please feel free to skip to the end if you don't want to read my goddamn autobiography.

Boring backstory (in case y'all are interested)
I've always been a massive fan of games that boil down to spreadsheets and skill trees--things where you level characters through a class system to unlock some wild shit (like FFT), games where you build up an empire (like My Life as a King), etc. However, I've always been held back by my skill set: I'm a writer by trade, but haven't really coded since you were a glint in the milkman's eye (in like 20+ years), so most of what I learned is obsolete. Plus, I don't have a lick of artistic skill, which means I would have had to hire an artist for even a working concept.

However, these are the problems of yesteryear. I've gotten decent with SwarmUI, and a work-related foray back into Python has shown me that I've got the basic logic shit down for coding (despite basically everything I learned in my youth being both obsolete and forgotten).

Will either of those be a great solution? Absolutely not! But they'll give me enough runway to make a basic prototype to see if it's worth sinking money into proper outsourcing, instead of spending big money on a boondoggle based on the impossible childish dreams of a nostalgic dork.

The dream (getting slightly more relevant)
The concept is several systems layered on top of each other:

• A character training/level-up system. Certain trainings, tasks, or assigned classes will slowly build stats over time, and once a character hits certain thresholds they can unlock new classes, with new skills and new artwork.
• A comprehensive class system. This is the most fun part for me--if I do a combination class and affinity system, then I can go hog-wild with special elemental sub-classes.
  • This is where the GenAI will come in handy, because if I'm going to have, say, 5 character types (blonde, brunette, redhead, Asian, dark-skinned) with 3 variations each (petite, busty, athletic), then there would need to be 15 variations per class. So if you start with the 5 standard fantasy base-classes (tank, fighter, archer, mage, healer) plus one for a peasant/unassigned, then you need 80 portraits. (Which would be a lot to commission on a whim for a game it turns out nobody wants.)
  • This is my first milestone. I want to be able to do the above, with the option to expand to the following if people like it.
• A relationship system. Personally observing training, building facilities they like, giving gifts, or going on an outing builds relationship; meet thresholds to unlock lewds.
• An equipment system with gear effects (basic do more/take less damage to start, eventually adding personal/global buffs and effects)
• A skill system that ladders into combat and town-building systems. Likely something like Tactics, where if you use/study a skill enough, you can equip it as a secondary in a different class.
• An automated combat system. To start, it would likely just be a text "Encountered goblins! Party defeated them, and took X damage. Party collected suspicious goo!", but if I can justify it I would love to bring on sprite animators and a proper dev to make a real-time Oger Battle-style combat system.
  • Combat would utilize skills that ladder into the combat system (either vague global effects (like passive damage increases) for the simple battle system, or proper skills (like throwing lightning bolts into the enemy backline) for the fancy shit).
  • The point of combat would be to gain xp, rescue people/acquire resources for the town, and/or loot magic gear for your fighters.
• A town management system. Player would start with a village, a handful of peasants, and one or two real fighters, and would need to build farms (support population), amenities (make money, attract new people), training facilities (unlock new classes, improve training efficiency), support structures (heal injured characters, build basic weapons and armor for your fighters, assess affinities for your characters), resource-gen buildings (for wood, stone, metal) etc.
  • Skills that passively affect the town while characters are present, IE a fire-magic skill that improves your forge, or a peasant-based skill that improves farm output.
• MC art and abilities. (MC would use a completely different system that's only got two classes: build (mostly town buffs) and destory (mostly combat buffs), and a story beat to explain why.)
• Global combat management systems (IE a quest system, special instance dungeons, town defense, etc)
• Finally, when all that shit is working, I'd want to add a story-mode involving other cities. Allies, rivals, enemies, monsters (and capture-and-train-able monster-girls, 'acourse), intrigue with other 'leader-types' of various persuasions, possibly some light world-domination... y'know, the uje.

What am I actually asking? (And why didn't I lead with this?)
To answer the second question first: because I'm dumb.

And to answer the first question: I want to build the game on a platform that:

• Handles well as a pointy-clicky menu-based system
• Isn't too weird and funky to learn
• Is common enough that I'll be able to find support & hire help
• Can be built in modular chunks that play nice with one another
  • Town trains Caracter who does Combat to develop Character skills and acquire Town resources, so they all need to be able to play nice, without having to build it all at once
  • I don't necessariliy mean the systems are completely separate, but just something I'd be able to easily collaborate on if I can get it to the point where I bring in help.

Ren'Py is Python-adjacent, but doesn't really have a good solution for combat. A bit of Internet research suggested Godot, which is supposedly similar to Python and has some great documentation, but seems to be more designed for 3d games or platformers, and I've noticed not many games posted here use it so I'm not sure if there's some other issues with it I don't know about. RPGmaker is fun to play around with, but it really doesn't feel like the right tool for the job. Unity is probably something I should look into, but I'm nervous about their whole "Hey by way I know we said free but we track who installs your program and are going to charge you a license fee for everyone who installed your game now kthx" debacle that happend a ways back. (I mean, they rolled it back, but they did still try). And of course, HTML/SugarCube is wonderful for a lot of "number go up until you see pictures" games, but I can't imagine what kind of nightmare this big chonky mess would be in that system.

So, uhh, I dunno where to start. Simple and scaleable, I guess.

I appreciate your time if you've made it this far, and would love to hear your thoughts & expertise.

Thanks!

 

[Winterfire]

Godot isn't "designed for 3d games or platforms" it's a general purpose engine like Unity. It can perfectly do 2D, or any other genre of game.
Also, Ren'Py can do combat as well, many such games (ex: https://f95zone.to/threads/sakura-dungeon-v1-0-5-winged-cloud.997/ )

It's pretty rare for a game engine to not be able to do something, more often than not the issue is the "developer"'s skills.

 

[waxing carnauba]

Yeah, I didn't mean that it wasn't possible to do combat in Ren'Py, just that it doesn't seem like it was built with that in mind (I mean, it does position itself as primarily a VN engine). I'm just coming at it from zero, so I'd like to make sure I'm not making my life harder by starting it on a language that I need to bend to my whim.

I've seen one or two games on here that have been scrapped and restarted because either (a) the original dev wanted a better platform, or (b) the original was abandoned and whoever picked up the mantle knew an easier, better, or more efficient way. (Then again, maybe it's just the new dev was more comfortable in a different engine?)

So is Godot a good place to start, then?

 

[Winterfire]

Yeah, I didn't mean that it wasn't possible to do combat in Ren'Py, just that it doesn't seem like it was built with that in mind (I mean, it does position itself as primarily a VN engine). I'm just coming at it from zero, so I'd like to make sure I'm not making my life harder by starting it on a language that I need to bend to my whim.

I've seen one or two games on here that have been scrapped and restarted because either (a) the original dev wanted a better platform, or (b) the original was abandoned and whoever picked up the mantle knew an easier, better, or more efficient way. (Then again, maybe it's just the new dev was more comfortable in a different engine?)

So is Godot a good place to start, then?

My honest opinion is that you should consider RPG Maker MZ (with plugins!) and scale your absurdly big idea into that. It has everything you need (Battle system, movement, quests, etc.) and more - with the plugins.
I don't feel like you would get very far with Godot, Unity, or other such options.

Not trying to be mean, but I feel like you don't have much experience and you're not exactly starting with a reasonable idea for your skillset. RPG Maker MZ (with plugins!) is probably the only choice you have if you really want your project to at least be playable in the near future.

If you want to challenge yourself and improve, you can write your own plugins. It won't be as harsh as starting with a blank project like Godot/Unity, but you'll improve your skills. Not to mention RPG Maker is highly scalable as well, people did crazy things with it, and it sells pretty well on steam as well.

 

[osanaiko]

That certainly is a monster of an idea.

It sounds like you have been around the block enough times to already to understand this, but I'll re-iterate a fundamental truth: Complexity is a project killer.

I don't see how a solo developer with little programming experience could possibly put together all those subsystems in a single push.

It's great to have big goals, but you need to understand that it is extremely hard to manage a project if you try to put *everything* in from the start.

The success rate (as defined by "get beyond a v0.1 release") of first time developers is already dismally low because optimistic and unrealistic estimates of the difficulty of doing "developer stuff". That's not a character flaw, it's just human nature to underestimate how difficult something is until you try to do it yourself.

The only way forward I could advise is to find a way to break down the idea to the absolute minimum set of systems and build something showing those first. Use the minimum viable game to get some experience developing in your chosen platform (and managing the writing at both the dialogue and plot levels, and getting artwork from external source, and building the UI, and building the basis for your systems, and managing community engagement... etc!)

If you find you have started to deliver something that works and people seem to like, *then* you can start adding in more complexity. Or finish your small game and then start a bigger one.

In the end, the most valuable skill a wannabe game developer can have is commitment - the ability to put aside distractions and "fun" in order to keep grinding the hours and hours that a project needs to make progress.

 

[Vegetable Soup]

You should probably take what the other posters are saying to heart, but I'll try to say something concrete here since I have some experience currently developing a mildly high complexity game in Godot that has some of the systems you want to implement.
First of all- No engine is going to do all of this for you, I think. The closest you'll get is probably rpgmaker, but I can't speak to that. What almost all of the above engines will do is give tools for abstracting out whatever problem you're dealing with into systems. Even if you use plugins/addons (and you should if you find ones that are a good fit! My project is particularly addon light and I'm still using something to manage data/writing for VN segments), you have to think about how to integrate those with the other abstractions you're making.
I think, as an exercise, you should try to put together just these things from your list:

• A character training/level-up system. Certain trainings, tasks, or assigned classes will slowly build stats over time, and once a character hits certain thresholds they can unlock new classes, with new skills and new artwork.
• An equipment system with gear effects (basic do more/take less damage to start, eventually adding personal/global buffs and effects)
• A skill system that ladders into combat and town-building systems. Likely something like Tactics, where if you use/study a skill enough, you can equip it as a secondary in a different class.

Have a simple interface where you can click some buttons(or type something) to affect state, and other buttons to get information telling you "how many items does character x have? What stats does character y have, would they change and by how much if I equipped this thing? What skills does this character have access to? Give x damage to this character, and now print out their health after any defense/damage calculations are done." etc. Make sure that if you unequip a skill or lose a buff its effects don't stick around. Probably a lot more that you should document your requirements for and work through. Basically, implement the bare minimum RPG shit and see how complex just that much could be for you.
If it's a huge, insurmountable mountain at your skill level, you should probably both:
A: scale it way back
B: use RPGMaker
That said, none of us really know what you can do! The only person that can really know if you can do this is yourself. Just be honest about what you're capable of and don't be so attached that you can't change course if it makes sense to.

 

[waxing carnauba]

Oh, absolutely! I wanted something that could handle something absurdly big, but I want to start small--a level-up system that lets you unlock classes (and artwork).

I don't know if there are any old-timers out there, but back in the days of Flash and dial-up, Corruption of Champions started as just that--a character in a box, and a few buttons that fed it random shit that mutated it. It wasn't even really a game, but it was fun to play with to just see what kind of monsters you could make. Then, very slowly, over many, many years, a game was built around that, piece by piece.

My nightmare is, I make this "push button, change outfit" system, people have fun screwing around with it, and I have to scrap the whole thing and start from scratch because I chose to build it out in a language that isn't suitable for the bigger picture, and it gets strangled in the crib because I can't be bothered to restart in another language. Hence why I went on about what would amount to a whole-ass project by a whole-ass team.

Anyways, I appreciate the advice and suggestions from all of you. I'll dig around through all the Godot tutorials and forums to see how far I can get with that, and fall back on RPG-maker if I get overwhelmed.