Try these reading these:

http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=277490&whichpage=1�
http://www.gamedev.net/reference/start_here/

How much do you know about making games? Made any till now?

GameTutorials.com
UltimateGameProgramming

We will be glad to hep you out, but you are the one who has to do the work. We can at the best give advice and links to resources.

Btw, you dont have to make an engine.An engine is a general piece of code that can be reused to make more games.If you are attempting your first game you can make your code specific to you game.

Now before you start you have to choose you grahics platform like OpenGL,DirectX, GDI or Mode13h.

Wait a sec.. tell us a bit about what you know /\

draw a screen full of tiles

create a map, draw a screen full of tiles, and have the player move through the map with the screen scrolling

add collision detection to wall type tiles

add multiple maps to the game, that is you can move from one map to another smoothly

start building a map editor

put some sort of scripting system in the game using Lua or some such language

put in enemy's that you can fight and NPC's you can talk to (this included basic enemy AI and scriptable NPC conversations if possible)

put in collision detection for object->object colision, such as players colliding with bullets/magic spells/etc, and players colliding with enemies/npc's. the general collision detection engine.

your also going to have to figure out a way to sort your objects so that it appears halfway decent. that is, you stand above a character and you appear behind him.. you can walk behind a building and in front of a light post, etc...

also, a layered system would be very nice... so that the tile's / maps can have multiple layers, e.g, things can appear under the player, and above him..

you dont want to restrict yourself to tiles. put in a system where you can put in "free floating" objects... that is, objects which aren't tiles, but whole objects, whole images...

put in some sort of state oriented plot system that will change throughout the game and effect things dynamically such as character dialogue

oh, dont forget about user interface, or skills/stats/levels.

start adding game content, like items, character dialogue, etc. oh, and you cant forgot the "simple" thing like a plot, storyline, and character development. also you need magic (if its in your game), and all those other sorts of combat including hand to hand combat or ranged weapons, etc.. a particle engine could help here tremedously (thanks leavoia!!)

oh, oh, dont forget some decent enemy AI. try to make as much stuff scripted as possible.

should take you either around a year to do or a few days/weeks/months to give up [smile].... once you get to this point come back for more instruction [smile]. im currently around the 14th step in that list on my RPG.. its taken me 6 months, over 10k lines of code and over 65 files, but my game is an online RPG, so i have a crap load more to worry about, and networking is what im working on now, which should keep me busy for at least the next month or 2. however, i only just started working on networking, so 98% of this code is non-networking stuff.. good luck.

I still want to see the 700 page book "Programming Tetris with C++".

Quote:Original post by MaxGame
Thanks for your answers...

But still, i'm lost..

I know a little about programming, I mean, i do understand but I don't know how to apply it. I'm trying to program in directx, c++ ... with Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0.. I have a book "Programming Role-Playing Games with DirectX" by Jim adams .. but I don't understand the flow of it ... I know I may not be the brightess Light out there (hehe) but I do have some programming skill when its well explained ...

The thing that would help me A LOT would be a sort of "Step-by-step" tutorial .. you know .. like ok lets start by programming our title screen ... ok next lets do our characters class ... etc etc ...

I'm really into game making, and if I would have the money, I'd hire a programmer to do the job (haha) but hey, I have to be able to do it .. I just have to

so please continue in your advice

thanks a lot for your support

if you need a step by step tutorial, then you aren't going to be able to do it. i'm not trying to be harsh, but there is no step by step tutorial on how to make a game. well, at least not a very complicated large scale game like an RPG.

you need to start (much) smaller. have you ever made a game before? start with pong. then make a slightly smaller game like pacman. you will find even a "simple" game like pacman is very complicated and will take a little while. once you have experiance making games, it will be much easier for you to make an RPG. but you must learn to crawl before you can walk, thats just how life is.

good luck.

I am a huge RPG fan, and love the old school 2D console games. I also love the 2D old-school CRPG's like Exile. (Where can I find this abandonware now?).

So as soon as I got my feet wet with "C++" (pre '98) I thought I would just jump right into making an RPG. However, I soon learned that I was in way over my head. There are many concepts that I didn't understand that were pre-reqs to making any game, much less an RPG.

There are too many books these days that promise too much for budding game developers, and many of them turn people away. I'm interested in the RPG book you mentioned, but only because I've disciplined myself to learning C++ first. I'm not saying that I know all of C++ because nobody ever does. You will be ready to make a game when you finally get the concept of whatever language you're using. Honestly, one day it just clicked. It was like a moment of clarity. My personal block was understanding that, when you program, all you're doing is essentially moving memory around. "C++ Demystified" does a great job of explaining this. It's small and not the most complete resource, but it's $20USD.

So it is a bummer to learn it'll take you a while to get where you want to be, but that's the test to becoming a strong programmer. It's just like physical strength in that it requires a lot of time, patience, and hard work that isn't always fun.

There is good news though, and this is what worked for me. Whenever you learn a programming concept, think of how it will apply to your game. Start practicing that way, even with console text output.

Instead of "Hello World", have your first program display "Welcome to the super 2D RPG!".

Instead of writing a "Guess-the-number" program, write a "Find-the-runestone" item.

When you learn math and operators, try to work out (in code) how a common turn based battle system will work.

It is important to understand how the framework of a game works, because if you dive right into graphics, you'll have a hard time understanding the difference between game-logic errors and graphic errors.

Just remember. Text RPG's are 2D, so you're not cheating yourself :)