So basically first person but not omnipresent? I think I can work with that by showing more of the protagonists point of view which may not be accurate
Either that or a malicious narrator that goes out of their way to make the protagonist as miserable or as unlucky as possible. Like a sadistic Dungeon Master for a D&D game.
Yeah the problem is I am only comfortable with HTML and CSS at the moment but I am still learning new things so maybe in the future I will make a Renpy or RPG maker game or something else and thanks for putting in the effort to write this I really appreciate it.
We all start from somewhere, I didn't escape from my HTML+CSS comfort zone until 2013 in my senior year of high school when a couple of juniors approached me wanting me to help them make a Facebook competitor called "The Bookmark" which I'm glad never saw the light of day.
I still have the backups of that and it's some genuinely bad code, even for the standards of PHP 5.5. Eventually I would catch on to some of the "improvements" of the language over time and it often took someone to give suggestions for what I should be using instead to make my development life easier.
One example was when I was writing a web scraper script in Python and I was relying heavily on a glorified XML parser called "BeautifulSoup" and I was solely using it to navigate the many nested tags of sites to access the media contents. Someone on a forum that I used to frequent back in the day mentioned "regular expressions" and from there I was able to shave off that dependency from my scripts and it was much faster since I could simply have a regular expression
(often shortened to "regex") comb through the HTML data without needing to parse it and convert it into an object.
From there I would take one programming course in my first semester of college which was an introduction to the C language course and so I would end up with PHP, Python, JavaScript, and C in my repertoire. The forum I was on also had people who taught me how web exploitation worked so I would end up making more secure websites and they would also teach me how to reverse engineer binaries so that I could sniff out malicious payloads in untrustworthy binaries that were often uploaded to said forum.
Right now I'm combing through the C++ specifications since I've been left way behind when it comes to the features that they offer, especially considering that I often avoided most of the standard library functions in C++ to begin with and the version that I had last looked into was C++11.
Since then there were 4 major updates to the C++ language specifications: C++14, C++17, C++20, and most recently C++23. The ISO/ANSI committees that oversee the specifications for several programming languages
(including C and C++) are already setting up the specifications for what will become C++26 so it's one of those things where if you get left behind then you're going to be doing a ton of catching up.
This is what I liked about the C language, not as many major revisions and updates to the specification meaning that code that was written more than 20 years ago will most likely still compile under a modern C compiler.
But I would only recommend learning C++ after you learn C, since the concepts you learn in C can be somewhat transferred over to C++
(although C++ did do away with va_list back in 1998/1999 in favor of variadic templates).
If I were to recommend a language that you could use to quickly prototype applications, then I would have to recommend Python. It's what I use to make proofs-of-concept before translating it over to C, and you have access to one of the best package managers for any programming language called
"pip".
With C/C++ you usually have to manually grab 3rd party libraries and then figure out a way to link them with the compiler and deal with any potential import pathing issues that may occur with some libraries. Although CMake does help out a bunch, there's still some finagling when it comes to dealing with 3rd party libraries in C/C++.
Rust seems to be a solid option since it offers better overall performance compared to Python while having a great package management system called
"cargo", although my gripe with Rust is that once you start installing packages then you start eating up tons of storage space and making small binaries will require some trickery. Even then you might end up having to resort to using a compressor such as UPX to get the resulting compiled object size down to what the C/C++ equivalent compiled object would be.
Golang is another good option, it integrates with GitHub so that you can import the URL of the repositories that hold the libraries you're wanting to use; albeit, if they receive frequent updates then you might find yourself having to rewrite functions ad-nauseum whenever the next push ends up breaking compatibility with your codebase.
If you're wanting to strictly adhere to the web format then you could potentially delve into NodeJS and pair that with Electron which is what Discord uses to make a desktop application out of their website. There are quite a few games out there that already opts for this method and I believe RPG Maker MV and RPG Maker MZ already makes use of this method for packaging games.
Zig is still too far into its infancy to attempt to make any sizable games in it, although it makes all sorts of promises regarding performance, it's still a toss-up when it comes to certain scenarios. Although it does have native interoperability with the C language if that's anything to be proud of
*(cough)* FFI *(cough)*.
You might have also seen a few games on this site written in Java such as
"Tales of Androgyny" which isn't the worst option out there but I personally wouldn't recommend Java for your first language. Nor would I recommend Microsoft's own version of Java known as C#
(the syntax is so similar that C# might as well be considered a spiritual successor to Java). Although I'm sure you've at least heard of Unity and seen many games here that are made in Unity which uses C# at its core. You might have also heard of the recent scandal with Unity and their attempts at forcing game devs to pay a bulk fee for 'x' amount of installations of a game; that sounds like something an executive would think up, no developer out here would want to entertain the idea of trying to track the number of installs of their applications because that's just a recipe for disaster.
There are some games that make use of Lua such as
"The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth" and the proprietary game making software called
"Visionaire Studio" which I'm somewhat familiar with which also uses Lua and their own homemade scripting language.
Game Maker Studio is another popular example of a game engine that has their own in-house scripting language called GMK which I find resembles JavaScript quite a bit from what I've seen of it.
While RPG Maker MV and MZ use JavaScript, the older releases from RPG Maker VX Ace and below relied on Ruby... I wouldn't recommend learning Ruby as your first language unless you're wanting to eventually learn Ruby on Rails
(often shortened to RoR) which is what GitHub uses to operate their backend codebase.
I'm definitely not going to be recommending PHP to you, even with all the improvements over the past few years; its Perl-like syntax might not translate all to well for other languages which was something I had to overcome when I would eventually shift my attention away from PHP and towards Python and eventually C/C++.
Carbon is in a similar boat with Zig when it comes to how new it is, I wouldn't recommend using it until it has had some more time to mature.
Crystal is a language that I'm completely unfamiliar with, same goes for Swift which is Apple's own proprietary programming language and is probably what you might delve into if you were wanting to make native iOS applications for the iPhone and iPad lineup of hardware.
You have no shortage of options when it comes to which language(s) you might want to learn some day; in fact you have so many options that it might be a bit overwhelming at first glance, the safest bets are the following: C/C++, Python, Rust, Golang, JavaScript, and maybe some Assembly if you feel like getting into the nitty-gritty of things
(best performing language out there to be honest, especially if you opt for a translating assembler and not an interpreted assembler).
