next »

[crazydave1066]

Hey everyone! I have always wanted to be part of designing a game, and recently I have realized that my favorite gaming genre, business and tycoon games, hasn't had the same punch since the early 2000s. I noticed that I have played those old games to death and want a new experience, but can't find anything as detailed. I have decided that I want to design my own business simulation game, with complexity and details rarely, if ever, included. I want to make the Dwarf Fortress or Aurora 4x version of a business simulation. Here's the problem: I have never designed a game before and have minimal programming experience. I am willing, however, to learn and take as long as I need to complete the game, whether that be years (minimum) or more likely a decade or two. The vision I have in mind is mostly text based. I was wondering if anyone could recommend a programming language I could use. For reference, I want to create a game similar to (but more complex) Capitalism Lab or Capitalism II minus the graphics. All decisions on purchasing, manufacturing, advertising, hiring, etc would come from a centralized menu with different icons to click on that would bring you to the appropriate screen. Does anyone know of a programming language that could suit this style? Thanks in advance! I admittedly don't know much about any programming language but based of recommendations I will learn whatever I have to.

[qMopey]

Which language you use doesn't really matter, for the most part. You will certainly want access to some rendering and audio, so that's about your only limitation, and most all languages will give you access to graphics and audio through a variety of different options. Even if you want to stick with text, you will likely use 2D rendering to draw pictures of text, instead of actually using only a real text terminal.

Personally I always recommend newcomers to use something like Love2D, gamemaker, or just plain C with the SDL2 library. The reason I recommend these options is that there's a huge number of people online willing to help and answer specific questions for these three. Personally I view the availability of people to help as the most important thing for a newcomer.

The Love2D forums are always quite active and the people are pretty nice. Just be sure to let them know you're really new and looking for some places to start. The idea of Love2D is it's a bunch of code someone else wrote that you can use to write a game with the Lua programming language. https://love2d.org/forums/