Hi all.

i'm a student in programming , so i don't have experience in games at all but ...

well , i don't know if you played elona , but i feel this game is totally unfinished ... and i want to make a roguelike who take back those ideas , and some from other games i liked , in a simple roguelike (not a steam game at $39.99 :D).

with a friend , i started thinking about it and we got a big problem : what language or engine we have to use ?

i think it must look like elona , so a turn based game , with simple graphics ...

and since i'm not experienced , i need something simple too ... i only know java (and ada , but that's not the better language :) )

so do you have tips ?

i saw RPG maker , but it's costly and i don't want to crack it (that's bad)

Well, those are really common questions (ignoring the description of the game) and the answers are always:

1 - If you're new to programming you can't "make a better game that this one I like", you have to start with the really basic ones (tic tac toe, pong... those games). Making a complex game (note I'm not talking about graphics here) is hard even for people who already know how to program.

2 - There are lots of game engines, for Java the one I see most people use is http://jmonkeyengine.org/, but I have no idea how easy it is. Unity is pretty easy since a lot of the things are done with drag and drop instead of coding and you can use C# (really similar to Java).

Anyway, I think (and I don't know if most people will agree) that if you want to learn how to program, you have to do more things before using an engine. They do LOTS of things for you and you won't learn much about those things. You learn A LOT if you try to draw and move an image with just a graphics library, or if you try to implement some collision detection, even if you make something really bad that even you don't want to play.

thanks for the answer. i'll try to do some little games before. gonna check this engine , and unity :)

If you are going for the learning approach: you can do it using just Java and its Standard library. That is how I started. Getting up the canvas set up starts out funky. But stick with it and you will LEARN A LOT! This approach gives you more control of how your game looks and feel. The downside is the amount of thinking and effort to come up with the system to do this is somewhat technical. Anyways you will get better as long as you start off programming simple games like pong, arcade shooter, small prototypes that illustrate a game mechanic, etc.

As for rogue like, I am not sure how long it will take one person to do it. But I remember coding an rpg from scratch after coding 5 games. It took me a whole month of programming (300 hours total: 10 hours a day sometimes more )just to finish it. I had to use other people art which is a good thing to do. It takes serious commitment even on the programming side. Pretty much a full time job mindset only with no pay.

The learning process and result are so rewarding.