Hello world!

I searched for a while a proper forum where discuss games development, I have a """little""" project to complete in spare time, but I need to know which tools use so, here I am.

Premise: I want to make a 2d management/rpg game, it is nothing particularly advanced I think, but I don't wan't to look like the dude who thinks creating a game is an easy task.

Which features I want to implement? What kind of gameplay?

Well, I'm thinking about a game where you manage your hotel (and much more), divided in floors, where you upgrade rooms, assign employees to certain tasks with a drag'n'drop system. Every floor is selected with a button, you just see the map with rooms and decide what to do wiht them and who assign where. Meanwhile the employees are assigned to their own rooms or they just spawn in a common selection area because they just come to work there.

If you want to look out of your building you click on the exit button and you have a new sort of menu, the local town (or city area) where you can select by clicking which building enter, you have shops, carpenter's workshop, docks, city council...I thought something like "Shakes&Fidget" town menu, where you can select what you need from a list or click the specific building, when you click you enter there you see another menu with the specific selections available. Meanwhile you can see you own hotel and how much is upgraded! You should be able to pay the city council to improve and upgrade the streets around you, install better lampposts and make your neighbourhood more attractive to customers.

Also you can see the world map and other locations where you can have more buildings to manage, for example a steamer floating casinò, or another hotel in another town/city/area. So I thought this "root" structure: World map, cities/towns, local areas, buildings, floors.

Then again, characters will have statistics, skills and abilities used while working, so I need to project how certain stats influence certain activities and which one is related to another, but I have already thought some for fights and challanges. Fight and challanges, talking about this you can also manage arenas/cage fights and "public events" such as pull the rope team vs team or 1v1 boxing match or stuff like that between your crew and rivals ones.

Then again (is a big project, I know) I would like to implement body transformations * for those subjects intended to trasform their bodies, and become more than humans. Have you ever played "Impossible creatures" ? well, I would like to change characters arms, torso and legs, add tails and wings, horns and antennas, change skin color and add tattoos, piercings, changing hairstyles... (ok maybe the last 3 ones can made in a normal barber shop or tattoo shop) in conclusion, body customization.

* It would be quite long for me to tell you the game's plot and how in the heck you connect a hotel-casinò sim with arena fights and laboratory transformations... I'm just telling you the most relevant features I want to insert so you will know exactly what I'm planning to create and you will answer me with all the informations you need. Leave the plot to me

Well, I guess it's everything. I don't know much about coding, I passed an exam of conding (C, MatLab) so I know the very basics things and way to operate with algorithms. I made some reseraches and I found some programs that I may use to work at this project (but I know there are more):

• Unity (They told me is not the best for 2d games...)
• Godot Engine
• GDevelop
• Dragon Bones (for animations)
• Defold

I still don't know which choose, meanwhile I'm practicing with digital drawings and drawing all the game concepts I came up with.

My question is: which software do you recommend me? As you read up here you see that I'm making a game wich requires a lot of 2d animations, but beyond that is all about 2d model customization, characters stats, leveling up/upgrading, and backgrounds.

I do apologies if this thread is not written with a perfect english or if something isn't clear. Thank you all for your answers!

5 hours ago, Boziik said:

hotel-casinò sim with arena fights and laboratory transformations.

Monster hotel is what I am getting from this.

5 hours ago, Boziik said:

Unity (They told me is not the best for 2d games...)

Funny considering that most of it's best games is 2D. They lied to you, Unity is much better 2D engine than it is a 3D engine and it is even a acceptable 3D engine. It uses C# so your C skills will help you a bit.

5 hours ago, Boziik said:

My question is: which software do you recommend me? As you read up here you see that I'm making a game wich requires a lot of 2d animations, but beyond that is all about 2d model customization, characters stats, leveling up/upgrading, and backgrounds.

If you use Dragon Bones your animations will be vectors so you need a engine that supports vectors, so all engines on the list will work.

Unity is what I would recommend. With some of the other engines you will need to make your own json importer, it's easy but time consuming.

2 hours ago, Infinisearch said:

First up would be are you gonna use Dragon Bones for animations?  If so you're limited to engines that can import its format.  In your list the only one that is listed as a supported platform is Unity.

edit - also I looked up if unity supports drag and drop, there appears to be tutorials for it so it seems to be supported.

I found that program seaching on the net, but maybe here someone could have suggested something different, I just listed the ones which gave me good impressions. I think I'll try Unity and Dragon Bones then, since they can work toghether.

2 hours ago, Rutin said:

You have many options for 2D games. You can either use GameMaker if you don't want to code off the bat, and would like to learn their scripting language GML later on, or you could go with Unity as well.

It really depends on if you want a pre-made engine, and how much you're willing to code yourself. If you have no coding experience at all, you should stick to something like GameMaker until you've improved those skills. If you know enough C# you can always give Unity a go as there are a ton of tutorials.

Well I don't mind spending time and learning how to code and watching tutorials, time's not a problem fortunately.

1 hour ago, Scouting Ninja said:

If you use Dragon Bones your animations will be vectors so you need a engine that supports vectors, so all engines on the list will work.

Unity is what I would recommend. With some of the other engines you will need to make your own json importer, it's easy but time consuming.

If they work fine toghether, I'm in!

11 minutes ago, Infinisearch said:

Do you really recommend this for what appears to be a first project?  In fact it looks like it might be the first attempt at coding something reasonably large.  I don't know if Boziik wants to get side tracked by getting a importer working.

BTW Boziik most getting started threads usually end up with responses like start with something smaller.

Oh yes I didn't say that: since I'm a learner, I will start with something smaller, then a prototype (still very simpler and smaller) of what I'm thinking about, and then starting the main project, after a lot of starting mistakes done with tests. I know that it is not recommended to start with something this large, even if my game will might look like a simple one, it will require a lot of coding and the best way to learn (imo) is creating something similar but smaller, making some tests before. I forgot to say that, sorry.

Well, thank you all for your support! I'm definetly going to combine Dragon Bones with Unity, then!