Hi there!

I want to create a sandbox game like Terraria or Starbound for mobile and I need tips on where to start.

Our story

I help run a community of 22,000 awesome gamers. We have a forum, we chat and we have a lot of fun. Recently, the game developer of our favorite game moved on to developing other projects. Our community has an incredible desire to reconnect on a new a game but we can’t find anything that fits our casual style.

What we know

We would really love to create a terraria-like sandbox game that could be multiplatform. The developer of a game we love suggested Unity and C#. We also have GameMaker studio and some great assets there.

We know game development is hard and making so we want to start by doing a smaller related project that could still inspire but be much more basic. We want to do something like Minecraft/Terraria etc. with mining and building but with a casual and peaceful feel.

The question

What is the smallest project we could do in which we could learn the most relevant stuff to building the kind of games we love?

Are there some related tutorials you could point us to?

Thanks for helping newbies like us!

Do you or anyone that would be helping have programming experience? Which platforms would you want it to run on? You mentioned mobile, but is that all?

Knowing these things will probably help someone answer your question. Assuming programming experience and that you're not set on a language or engine, I'd say look at any starting libgdx tutorials, and general networking.

If no one working on the project has programming experience I'd say the first step is learning how to program.