Thread: Help Needed fellow Gamers

Game dev is not for the faint of heart. Application development is simple in comparison. But you need to know the basics of programming to even begin to think about game dev. My personal tips...

Do not recreate the wheel. Use libraries that already exist whenever you can. Especially if you are an indie developer without a team of people.

Use engines that you can leverage for free. Unity, Unreal, Godot. I'm not a huge fan of those all in one dev environments, but they have their place and when you are trying to get started, they can give you a leg up. Another of that type is gamemaker, though that one will cost you a bit to get started.

If you are doing everything... sound, music, graphics, programming, etc... then know when you should use placeholders. Don't wait to do X part of your game until you get the graphics done. Get that part of the game working and use simple shapes or graphics from free or cheap graphics libraries until you have time to work on the real thing. It's easier to make graphics than deal with game logic.

Know when to delegate. If you aren't good at graphics or music or whatnot, then either buy someone's time and have them do it, or find libraries of media you can purchase and drop in place. It's not the best idea, but it's better than doing your own and having the game suffer due to subpar content. So basically, know your limitations. Not everyone is good at everything.

Do NOT allow scope creep to make your project overly large. It's great to have a big idea and want to implement 8000 different things in your game. You just KNOW it will make it stand out. But that's the perfect way to ensure that you do not finish it. Boil your idea down to the barest minimum features and implement those. Get the game running and to a state you are happy with. You can always go back and add something later even if it means redesign and recreating it from scratch. Too many game developers have a great idea and as they start implementing their ideas realize that maybe they bit off a bit more than they could chew. So they back off a bit.. decide to drop a few items... and then realize that one or two of those items affected other areas of the game... and then they realize they've manage to irrevocably break it. Then it gets set aside and never finished.

Along those same lines, make sure you design the game out on paper (or in a document somewhere). You want to figure out EVERYTHING you want the game to do (without scope creep as mentioned above) and only then do you want to sit down in a development environment and start making the game. It's a tedious part of the process, but a necessary one. If you start making things up as you go, you are going to forget something and you might find that through your code design, it might be very difficult or impossible to fix.

I dono't know what the scope of the game you show is, but price to develop is entirely up to what you value your time at... The development tools themselves can be free. So it comes down to your time.