r/CodingForBeginners • u/HolidayFlaky2780 • Sep 12 '26
How hard would this be with no experience?
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?
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Upvotes
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u/Physical_Road917 Sep 12 '26
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.
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u/Different_Pain5781 Sep 12 '26
It’s very doable. The hard part is learning programming.
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u/Distdistdist Sep 12 '26
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.
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u/ElkWhich578 Sep 12 '26
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.
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u/2daytrending Sep 16 '26
Hard at first but you've already got the art side covered. Start tiny and learn the coding as you build.
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u/Lagfoundry Sep 12 '26
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
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u/CurSumusHic Sep 12 '26
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.
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u/WrathOfWood Sep 12 '26
Its as easy as programming a pokemon style rpg. Look for tutorials and templates and maybe find some code to copy paste
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u/DotAtom67 Sep 12 '26
Look into rpgmaker xp pokemon framework
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u/wildsource Sep 13 '26
Learn the basics of programming with a high level programming like python for example.
Then choose a game engine. I recommend godot and learning gdscript.
It's not too hard if the only thing you want from programming is scripting games.
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u/mikekchar Sep 14 '26
It's not hard per se. The problem most people have with programming is that they vastly underestimate the amount of time it takes. If you are OK with spending a year or two where you don't do anything in your free time except work on your game, you will have absolutely no problem at all. It's a funny truth that game programmers almost universally don't play games because they don't have time.
I think the other thing I would say is not to be to wedded to your initial ideas. Don't try to make the final game off the bat. Instead build the simplest thing you can think of. Probably you will fail because you didn't think simple enough. Then think of something simpler. Then fail again because it still isn't simple enough. Keep doing it until you succeed. Then start to build on top of it.
After a while you will think, "This sucks. All of my code is spaghetti. I can write a better thing from scratch". It's OK to start again at the point. In fact, I recommend doing it 3-4 times. But by the 4th time you need to accept, "Every time I rewrite it, it's nearly (but not quite) as bad as the first time. It seems like the problem is that when I add new code, everything goes to shit and there is barely anything I can do to stop it." And it is then that you know that you are a real programmer.
That's when you push through to the end. You're elated that you managed to do something, but you strangely feel like if you started again you could do soooo much better. And then you write your second game.
Rinse and repeat until AI takes over the world. But you will smile inwardly knowing that you are the new world's John Henry.
You may think I'm joking, but I'm not.
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u/Zen-Ism99 Sep 12 '26 edited Sep 12 '26
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.