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[Teodex]

Hello everyone.

I've been thinking of getting into this game development thing as a hobby for quite some time, and I decided that I have waited enough.

I'm trying to figure out a simple enough engine to do a text based dungeon crawler (turn based, no art).
Being almost computer illiterate I want to start with sommething simple, and would like to pick the proper engine. So far I've looked into Twine and Renpy, but I'm still at a loss.

What I'm trying to make is:

-Simple character movement in between interconnected areas (north, south, etc). 
-Turn based combat, with somewhat complex RPG system.This is the one part I want to make somewhat more complex, having multiple primary stats for the Player Character, NPCs and other creatures, as well as a set of derived stats and skills.
-Multiple NPC/enemies that could move from one area to another on their own.
-Little to no art. For my first try I could simply rip some stock images for background and some .jpg for character portraits. Or just use text.

So I just want something easy to get into, but that I could scale up once I now what I'm doing.

Any recommendations?  Thanks in advance.

[jgrams]

When you say text-based, do you mean where you move around an ASCII-art map like Nethack or ADOM?  Or are you thinking of something more like interactive fiction or a MUD, where you get a description of a room and can type (or click) commands?

If the former, I don't know that there's a really trivial way in.  There's theT-engine, which I've heard both good and bad things about.  There are tutorials for making a roguelike in Python and libtcod.

If the latter, Twine is probably the easiest place to start.  I know you said you tried it and you're still at a loss, but you might try this introduction to making a stat-based game.  There's also Inform 7 which has a sort-of-natural-language-like syntax and excellent documentation and lots of examples.

But anything you do is going to involve some coding (even if it's disguised with a pretty drag-n-drop interface, it's still the same kind of thinking) and quite a bit of work.  It's not that hard but it will take some time and effort.  I'd start with Twine, if I were you. It's probably the easiest, you can go a surprisingly long way with it, and what you learn will help you with other systems if and when you decide to move on.

Edit: Seedship is a neat example of what you can do with stats in Twine.

[Teodex]

Thanks. Yes I mean more like the latter. I only had a surface look at Twine before, but I think I will try to get deeper into it.