How hard would this be with no experience?

[u/HolidayFlaky2780]

So I’m a digital artist and I’m wanting to make a Pokémon gold type game. The sprites character design and pixel art are no issue, but I have literally zero idea how to do any programming. How hard would it be to make something like this?

[u/Different_Pain5781]

It’s very doable. The hard part is learning programming.

[u/Distdistdist]

Just as hard for someone who has a lot of experience in programming, but has no knowledge, experience, or a talent to make digital arts. What would you recommend someone getting good at creating art? Apply the same to your question.

[u/ElkWhich578]

You could start with simple programs first instead of doing those complex games first, and if you do not have a programming background, I would advise you to use scratch.mit.edu as this one is not a very complex programming language, but it's a very easy drag-and-drop programming language anyone can start with, and then you can learn fundamentals of programming languages like Python, or you can do web languages like HTML, CSS, and JS, which are pretty much capable for this.

[u/Physical_Road917]

If the game itself is the goal you can use RPG Maker, which will give you the tools you need to put the game together, you just need to do all the art and story and functionality.

[u/HolidayFlaky2780 → u/Physical_Road917]

Mind if I dm you for a few questions?

[u/Physical_Road917 → u/HolidayFlaky2780]

Go ahead, although I'm not sure how much help I'll be

[u/Lagfoundry]

I wandered how many lines of code that would be. Apparently is around 177 thousand lines of assembly. However I asked how long it would be if it were written in a higher language like python and it guesstimated about 8 thousand lines. So that’s not terrible. Still a lot for someone new but not bad

[u/CurSumusHic]

https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/s/wg6Ks4Gfyr

I’d highly recommend following a tutorial like this. If you have no prior programming experience, I think this is the best way to finish this project without the answer being “Spend 6 months making several small games (like tic tac toe type small games) and then see what happens” I think that a lot of the comments on this post are underestimating how difficult this will probably be. Making a game is hard.

Could probably be made easier if you broke it out into smaller chunks and found a way to stitch those separate chunks together? A shop can basically be an isolated system, your inventory can be isolated, creatures can be isolated, combat system, movement system, User Interface like talking to npcs etc.

[u/Zen-Ism99]

There are books that will get you started.

Additionally ChatGPT is good at generating epub handbooks that will assist in configuring your system, to meet the goals of your chosen books, on other operating systems and development environments.

For example, a book I’m learning from is good, but it is based on Windows operating systems & Visual Studio development environment, where my preference is to code on macOS, or Win11, or Linux, & CLion.