It's fucking hot today and I really don't feel like doing much and I'm not installing garbage AAA titles on my PC so I've thought of the next best thing and decided to do a bit of a writeup on how I would make a game using whatever I could find at my disposal but from a complete noob perspective.
This has been kind of prompted by a debate I was having with somebody with regards to modding. I maintain that even somebody who has very little to no programming experience can in fact make a game from scratch these days. I wouldn't run away from programming though, because even having a good knowledge of it will set you apart from a lot of devs out there especially these days.
However you really don't need to be a massive autist and learn every part of the engine in order to make something good if all you want to do is make something for free and do your own thing rather than waste time on these awful modern titles that have woke shit everywhere.
So how do we actually get started? Well my first software recommendation is going to be very uncharacteristic but this is all about finding the most efficient and fast solution to making a game possible without any asset restrictions and the fact is Unreal 5 is probably the way to go.
https://dev.epicgames.com/community/unreal-engine/learning
This engine really does have everything you need, including blueprints which is just a fancy form of visual programming that the people making the engine have made. The Unreal Engine itself also comes with an incredible amount of assets even just by default and you also get First Person and Third Person templates so you can get to work on a game right away nearly if you want.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCJ3174CssY
This is the sort of tutorial I'd look through about that and the good thing about the blueprint system is you don't have to rely on it if you find yourself getting confident in programming and can go under the hood if necessary.
Now I saw that there were complaints about the idea of making your own stuff which I do encourage and for that I'd recommend Blender and Krita which is open source, but they have all the tools to make your own assets. However this is about the quick and simple approach so I'm going to look at asset marketplaces. Unreal Engine already has it's own marketplace, however PolyHaven is another very good source for textures and the like as well as models.
All of these are 100% free and copyright free at that, so that way you wouldn't run into any issues with using them for your projects. I think as long as you're very upfront about where you get your models from, people wouldn't care especially if it was a free project anyway you're playing around with for fun. It's the people who are deceptive and try to pretend it's all their own work when they obviously bought the assets and what not that are the issue. Be sure to double check the fine print of what you download and you should avoid most problems with copyright.
After this, I would look at tutorials on Unreal for specific game genres and mechanics. Yes it will take time, but that's the point as well, you'll be able to make something with this that doesn't run like shit and you can play around with everything as much as you want. As opposed to for example constantly wrestling with a buggy and out of date engine that the devs are never going to bother fixing.
Oh and if you want to make something that isn't an FPS/Third person game, I got you bro.
I'm a gamedev. Realistically, if you have no programming skill and no art skill, I would not recommend anyone to make a 3d game in the unreal engine. Likely anyone attempting this as a first step will just give up. Start much smaller instead. Stick to 2d. Get the game maker studio. For art, 3 possibilities: stick to shapes (lookup geometry dash for inspiration), paint over pixel art from 16bit era games or use an ai art generator. Keep it simple, do a 'chose your adventure', visual novel type of thing or a platformer. Yes it's going to suck probably but eventually, if you stick with it, you'll learn the skills and can go bigger.
The inability to make art seems like a bigger hurdle than programming, funnily enough. It’s easier for an artist to become a programmer than a programmer to become an artist.
Even if everyone could do both, the time that art demands vs the willingness of people to put it in results in a lot more demand for art than supply.
The problem is anyone learning to make games has ambition to make Skryim / Final Fantasy / Call of Duty or whatever their dream game is.
No one wants to go back and make Space Invaders for their first game (but they should).
I feel like there have been more successful 2D indie titles than 3D
It's true. There are a lot fewer non-indies working in 2D.
GMS enjoyers rise up
It truly is the most enjoyable experience I've ever had making a game. It's just a shame absolutely no studios use it so it's a complete waste of time unless you plan on making a solo project.
Unity and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
I agree, learning programming is always the way to go, however at the same time i feel like if people just want to mess around with a 3D project they absolutely should. I mean really, when it comes to software generally I find simply messing around and breaking stuff then starting over is the best way to learn. I did also post tutorials on the blueprints for people who are okay with trying to learn it.