Hi everyone,

So for the past year or so I've been creating ideas for two different games, and now I think I finally have both the motivation and the time to at least get started. I won't go into details for story and such, but I want to make something sort of like the old zelda games in terms of gameplay, but with things like hp, magic/skills and mana points, experience, etc. Another possibility I was thinking of was the same game, but a 2d side scrolling world, but it's connected and you can go back through the world at any time (I think this would be harder, i don't know.) Also, regardless of which route I go, I want to keep it either 8 or 16 bit, just to take me back to my early days of gaming

I don't know how I would go about doing this. One option I thought of was just to use gamemaker, I'm familiar enough with it to make simple games, so it wouldn't be too challenging to go further. But I feel like there are too many limitations with that engine.

However, I feel that I'm nowhere near adept enough in the languages I'm somewhat familiar with (java and C) to even begin a game with an engine based on either of them.

So what I'm asking is if there's a simple game engine that will allow me to create something as described with minimal coding, or maybe an easy-to-use scripting language that I could work with?

Two that I found on the internet and had in mind are rpgtoolkit and ohrrpgce, but I don't know much about either.

Thanks in advance for any help!

when using gamemaker have you used drag and drop or codes?
because gamemaker is okay and i have used it for a long time by using its own code. I mean if your zelda like game is really like the old zeldas in which it is a top down view then gamemaker can handle that. It can even be used to make complex game types like real time strategies like star craft 2, but don't make things too big or it can crash multiple times.
But otherwise gamemaker is made to create to those small types of old console/arcade type of games.

@mk - I've done drag and drop and a bit of coding, but not enough to say I'm familiar with it. The only thing I'm worried about with using game maker is the size of the level I'll be using for the over-world (It'll be pretty big either way if I go with the 2d side-scroller I mentioned, or the zelda style game) and possible issues with aliasing and connecting the dungeons/stores/whatnot. I don't know, I'll give gamemaker a try though, just because it's pretty easy for the most part, if anything I can create check-points of sorts to connect different maps. I still need to figure out how to connect different rooms in that manner, the majority of the games I made were crap tbh, it was for a class using gamemaker. The farthest I went was a jailbreak game lol. But I'll give it a look.

@goran - I thought blender was generally used for 3d games?

Oh, one other thing I found was a website with a bunch of resources and tutorials for making NES games, it was from a university course somewhere. Maybe I'll give that a quick look too.

If you want to do Java, i'd recommend jMonkeyEngine

Edit: Should probably elaborate a bit: The tutorials are excellent, the community helpful and the engine is really easy to use. It uses OpenGL for rendering models from i.e. Blender.

@mk - I've done drag and drop and a bit of coding, but not enough to say I'm familiar with it. The only thing I'm worried about with using game maker is the size of the level I'll be using for the over-world (It'll be pretty big either way if I go with the 2d side-scroller I mentioned, or the zelda style game) and possible issues with aliasing and connecting the dungeons/stores/whatnot. I don't know, I'll give gamemaker a try though, just because it's pretty easy for the most part, if anything I can create check-points of sorts to connect different maps. I still need to figure out how to connect different rooms in that manner, the majority of the games I made were crap tbh, it was for a class using gamemaker. The farthest I went was a jailbreak game lol. But I'll give it a look.

@goran - I thought blender was generally used for 3d games?

Oh, one other thing I found was a website with a bunch of resources and tutorials for making NES games, it was from a university course somewhere. Maybe I'll give that a quick look too.

Like i said before i made an rts game like star craft, but it did get to big because i made huge graphics. Just be careful and always make backups because gamemaker has been known to crash multiple times for a lot of people including me.

well okey, maybe I said wrong thing about gamemaker. But I believe people can make good games without using it, it limits you on so many ways..