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.
The problem with your argument is that I see the state of modding and it is such a shitshow to even install any of the good stuff and get it running that you may as well be making your own game with the amount of effort it takes.
This is where I disagree with you though. How is it a shitshow to install any mods nowadays and how would be making a game easier? There's nothing stopping you from installing mods for anything nowadays.
Anything from Bethesda, you literally just drop the files into the game's directory and activate through the dozen mod managers there are. You could do it yourself too if don't like mod managers, it's a single line of the filename in a text file to activate any esp or esm for a gamebryo/creation engine. You don't even have to do that for texture/mesh replacement either, it's just drag and drop. Same with engine fixes and script extenders, drag and drop or just run a bat file.
The other big modding scenes for Bioware games or CDProject are exactly the same. Download, drop into directory and activate through a manager.
Want to hack or translate a rom? Load a patch and just point to the rom and select a out directory. Want to install CFW or console hacks? Load a website with the exploit on the console and it'll do all the work for you. Even server emulators are easy, I can have my wow server up in four mouse clicks and I didn't have to write a single line of code or do any database work.
I'm in a lot of modding and emulation communities and I honestly don't see where your argument is coming from.