My advice, which I wish was plastered everywhere because I never found it: start and finish many small games first. Keep dreaming up and writing down the ambitious ideas, but leave those for another time.

Also, don't build your own game engine(unless you have plans to never ship). Learn to use Unity/UE4/GameMaker/etc.

Writing game engines is a blast, but they're the ultimate in feature creep/nerd sniping. You'll spend all your time building the engine rather than focusing on gameplay.

I think it's a good idea not to write an engine.

But I also think that for most small games (1-2 developers) it can also a be a good idea not to use an off the shelf engine either.

Write the absolutely minimum that you can get away with to achieve the gameplay and look you want to achieve. Hard code everything for your specific game.

It's true that if you want to write an engine you can distract yourself from focusing on gameplay. But I think you can actually fall into the same trap using an off the shelf engine too. You end up spending a pile of time learning and working with the advanced tools and not focusing on gameplay either!

The basic rendering APIs are actually not that hard to use if you forget about generalising everything for some future that never arrives, and there is a hell of a lot to be said for working on a code base that one person entirely understands. The development speed benefits of this should not be underestimated.

GameMaker seems to be a sweet spot for the 1-2 person dev teams. I know quite a few indies like Vlambeer use it to pretty great success.

Yeah, but those 6 months you spent on getting the ocean waves in the background, for that 15 second cut scene, just right are the best 6 months ever. :)

I know a 3D artist who has been creating his first game in GameMaker Studio and it looks really solid for a debut solo effort:

Game site: https://papadar.itch.io/eatvolve

Playthrough of an older version here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9JgvTus0O0

GameMaker Studio: https://www.yoyogames.com/gamemaker

Godot 3 was recently released. I've only gone through one tutorial so far but having used both unity and game maker it has so far been a good experience. Not that the others were bad.

I recommend Unreal Engine 4. It's an amazing platform and very complete now, with a good community and fantastic resources.

I hear it has an excellent and very fair licensing model too, besides the fact that it has templates for everything. Want to write an FPS? They have a template for it.

Building an engine is a project of its own. If you want to build an engine and a game, then go ahead. If you want to build a game, there are enough engines available that you can find something to fit whatever you'd like to make.

Just get started with something simple and gradually increase / add complexity. Nowadays there are really great engines that pave your way. Do make good use of them. Any of them will teach you about the game loop, gfx, control, sound, ai etc subsystems that needs to work together to deliver an experience for your players. Also do read about game design. I personally liked Jessie Schell's Art of game design book with the 100 lenses that helps younalong the way.

If you are confident and enjoy coding in Javascript, try https://phaser.io/

Not really an answer, but I recently saw there's an effort to modernise the Moria source code: might be a fun way to play/help with a game that's loved by many:

https://github.com/dungeons-of-moria/umoria/blob/master/READ...

My strategy is to look at the type of games already made that are of the type I want to make (whether it be Minecraft, Flappy Bird, or Diablo) and look at what game engine/program the developers of that used. Then I know it is possible and in all liklihood a good idea to use that framework to make that sort of game.

If you don't want to use Unity or another one of the big engines and know C++, I've written a library for 2D games like this which focusses on being easy to use: https://github.com/jhasse/jngl

I recommend Unity. It's about as beginner-friendly as it gets, and you can see results fast. My brother and I have both had a blast playing with it. If you already know how to code, you can probably do a lot with it.

As an experienced hobbyist game developer, I find Unity to be an incomprehensible airplane cockpit of bad UI.

For the kind of game presented in the article, Gamemaker Studio would be more reasonable. Unity has a lot you don't need, which obscures the path to making something simpler like this.

I'm sure there are other good options too. I think there's a JS-based platformer-oriented engine out there.

In addition to Godot, I found Love2D to be pretty cool too.

+1 love2d. I made the beginnings of an arcade graphics style roguelike a couple of years ago https://github.com/globalcitizen/zomia ... it was the first game code I'd written in 20 years and the positive results came fast enough (despite zero Lua experience) that I could stay motivated to keep at it!

> I'm relatively confident with programming in general

Out of curiosity, why do you bother writing a statement like this? Is it to assuage your ego? If you haven't done game development before, it's safe to assume there are gaps in your knowledge and you're better off admitting it outright.

Could you please follow the site guideline that asks you to "respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize"?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

passivepinetree did admit to have knowledge gaps, hence the "I don't know where to start". The point of that statement is to inform people who might want to help (rather than mock or chide) that passivepinetree doesn't need a guide to learn how to program, only specifically about writing games.