Is it possible to create a game with no skills?

[LeakAngel]

Hey,

I kinda want to create a game, be it very simple. I have no skills in dev whatsoever, so I really don't know if it's feasible, or where to start.
To start, I'd be very happy with a linear story or with just a few quests for example.
We'll see for inventory, non-linear story, and stuff like that.

The only thing I hope I know is writing, and I can get help from friends. My issue here is: do I need to learn code? Where should I start? and other linked questions.
I know it's not easy, I know it'll take time, it'll be frustrating, etc.
Same for art assets, at first I'll just use quick sketches placeholders, I want to focus on creating a nice game before. No money making of course, purely passion project.

I will be very glad for any advice, resources to look at and any help you guys can give me. Thanks!

PS: Sorry if such a thread already exists but I didn't find anything in the Dev Help section.

 

[danasavage]

Hi! I totally come from a writing background and have been muddling along for the last year or so. I started making a game in Twine but after a while I realized I wanted it to look a lot more swish, so I've been porting it over into Ren'py.

I would say for purely text based (or like just a few static images) then Twine is a nice place to start. I learnt quite a lot and even managed to accidentally learn some basic coding (without even realizing it!). Good luck

 

[LeakAngel]

Hi! I totally come from a writing background and have been muddling along for the last year or so. I started making a game in Twine but after a while I realized I wanted it to look a lot more swish, so I've been porting it over into Ren'py.

I would say for purely text based (or like just a few static images) then Twine is a nice place to start. I learnt quite a lot and even managed to accidentally learn some basic coding (without even realizing it!). Good luck

I actually tried to use Twine and yeah, it seemed to be a pretty good start. I think I'll continue with Twine and try adding some side stories to the linear main story so it looks like a "novel" but yeah. I'll probably become picky soon enough with inventory management ahah

Could I see what your firstgame looked like?

 

[danasavage]

Twine can actually get pretty complex once you dig into it. For me it was simply that I didn't have enough control of the visuals (without learning a whole bunch of CSS) and wanted everything to look a little slicker. To do more complex stuff in Renpy i'm learning that i'll need to brush up on Python! ANd yeah, of course, my game actually has a thread on this site. I'm just in the process of trying to port as much of that over into Renpy now as i can

 

[mickydoo]

I did/am. I wanted to make something after I played a few games, never had heard of renpy, heard of Daz but was only vaguely aware of what it was used for. I just taught myself as it was something I really wanted to do.

 

[Avaron1974]

I hope so, i'm trying it myself and I have no idea what i'm doing.

Spoke to some devs I know and got told to keep it small for my first attempt.

Plenty of tutorials for stuff online, just a case of finding them.

 

[GNVE]

I did/am. I wanted to make something after I played a few games, never had heard of renpy, heard of Daz but was only vaguely aware of what it was used for. I just taught myself as it was something I really wanted to do.

Same here. Learned about Ren'Py and Daz from another dev who uses it to make his game and mentioned it somewhere.
Daz is a bit of a love hate relationship at times while I love Ren'Py so far. This is not in the last place because Python is relatively easy and therefor fun to learn. (I had tried to learn HTML in the past and after a couple of hours I had a very crappy looking site while in python I had a fully functional text-based game in the same amount of time).

 

[xMentat]

Renpy is designed to make scripting VN type (i.e the writing and image display parts) games easier, but there are also a lot of complex things which you can do with Renpy (it's really Python, but let's not split hairs).

If your game just has a linear flow with few choices, you don't need much programming experience. But, if you want to remember previous choices made in the game and do anything more complicated, you need at least to understand the concept of variables, flow control (IF statements), labels. etc.

My approach to learning something new in software development is always to look at what someone else has already done! If there's a game which does something I don't understand, I look at the *.rpy files in the "game" folder. You may have to unren them using

You must be registered to see the links

or similar, but loads of games don't create .rpa archives and don't hide the .rpy files.

 

[4ce0fSp4des]

No, you definitely need some knowledge about 3D modelling and/or spritesheet animation and also programming basics.

Visual scripting interfaces such as UE4 blueprints and common material editors make it easier to develop without lots of coding skills but still you need them and also the mathematical understanding of common problem solving methods.