11-04-2012, 05:18 AM
(11-03-2012, 10:40 PM)Woppet* Wrote: I've been writing down my ideas for a game for years.
Planning on making it one day, how difficult would it be to program a game that is about as complete as 2D zelda games ie Minish Cap?
That depends on how much general programming experience you have and whether you use some game-specific IDE or creator or a general programming language (where you'd have to see what libraries and resources you can find to make life easier).
Let's say I've been on and off working on a Zelda clone for a few years, restarting the whole thing tons of times but whatevs and then I DIG.
Figures GameMaker, Stencyl, Unity and all that would be easier if you have not too much experience with programming. Otherwise, C# with XNA is said to be nice. I personally use Delphi Pascal with Andorra2D for graphics and Bass.DLL for sound, but I make all classes, interactions and collision checks et cetera myself.
No matter what, it definitely takes a lot of time, especially when it is your first project. Following games always benefit from your experience and you probably can reuse a lot of things (I took the main core of my Zelda clone for DIG and will probably take the main core of DIG once I get back to my Zelda clone as I have advanced it a lot since then).
I've been workin on DIG for over a year (while doing tons of other things, of course, it's not a full-time job) with a few week- and month-long breaks, but that's inevitable and since I'm constantly learning and improving, it happens that I rewrite certain code sections several times (when adding new mechanics that don't fit in seamlessly at first et cetera).