Others What is the best engine for my game/skill-level?

[Degen Djinn]

Hey all. Over the course of the last couple of years I've been working on my game "Spooky-Heart Manor" in GMS2, learning from scratch as I go. I've made some pretty decent progress recently in terms of creating an RPG foundation in GMS2, but it still kinda sucks. The engine doesn't really seem like its built for the type of game I'm trying to make. I'm sure it's possible, But learning GML as I go has been incredibly difficult, and at this point in development, it seems like every moving part is getting in the way of every other moving part, and I think it is in my best interest to just start from scratch in another more restrictive engine.

The game in question is a fenoxo-inspired text-based RPG/Dating-Sim/Management-Game with a pretty minimal combat system. I'd been trying to marry that with an Undertale-style JRPG overworld with some ARPG combat, but I think it best I give up on that idea for now.

With that said, I just recently made the switch to Twine, and I'm starting to rebuild it from the ground up. But Ren'Py seems to be the more popular option for text-heavy games, and I personally like the games that I've played built in Ren'Py quite a bit. But I cannot stress enough that I am SUPER new to coding, and even Twine seems a bit overwhelming to me in its minimalism. I'm just unsure which engine to pick.

So my question(s) is/are: Which one? I feel Twine is the better pick for me, but I'm not really sure just how much I can do with it.
If I build the game in Twine, is it feasible to port it over to Ren'Py, assuming I've improved my coding skills over the course of development, or is it an entirely different beast?
And lastly, what coding language is the best for me to focus on learning at this point? Javascript? I really don't even know where to begin with coding-languages, and I don't think my (minimal) knowledge of GML will really transfer well to anything else.

Thanks in advance, and my apologies if I'm not communicating my thoughts very well. I just abandoned my baby-project of the last two years, and I'm honestly pretty upset right now.

 

[Alcahest]

It's been a while since I played adult games, but I haven't seen a text-heavy renpy game anywhere closely resemble a Fenoxo game. The typical renpy game is a lot of clicking to see the next line of text. Not ideal for displaying a lot of text. You can make renpy games to show more text at once, but I'm answering to your statement about what's popular for text-heavy games. Fenoxo and such games are not made in renpy, but html or something close to it, if I'm not mistaken. So Twine could do it, although you should go for Tweego instead since working in Twine sucks in comparison to using a real text editor.

If you use Twine/html, you also have to learn css, and javascript would be good if you want to do some more advanced stuff than just display text. Renpy coding is based on python. Porting from html/css/javascript to renpy wouldn't be hard per se, but time consuming as you would have to learn how to code in renpy/python and you would be pretty much coding and setting everything up from scratch. It seems pointless to do it like that instead of just doing it in renpy from the start. As far as coding goes, making a game with renpy isn't harder than doing it in html/css/javascript.

 

[Degen Djinn]

It's been a while since I played adult games, but I haven't seen a text-heavy renpy game anywhere closely resemble a Fenoxo game. The typical renpy game is a lot of clicking to see the next line of text. Not ideal for displaying a lot of text. You can make renpy games to show more text at once, but I'm answering to your statement about what's popular for text-heavy games. Fenoxo and such games are not made in renpy, but html or something close to it, if I'm not mistaken. So Twine could do it, although you should go for Tweego instead since working in Twine sucks in comparison to using a real text editor.

If you use Twine/html, you also have to learn css, and javascript would be good if you want to do some more advanced stuff than just display text. Renpy coding is based on python. Porting from html/css/javascript to renpy wouldn't be hard per se, but time consuming as you would have to learn how to code in renpy/python and you would be pretty much coding and setting everything up from scratch. It seems pointless to do it like that instead of just doing it in renpy from the start. As far as coding goes, making a game with renpy isn't harder than doing it in html/css/javascript.

I see, Thank you. That answers my question perfectly. I've never heard of Tweego, I'll definitely look into that!