want to do like a text game with some images in c#, kind of like twine, but i dont want to use an 'engine'

[sfasdfsdafsda]

is it going to be a lot more work to keep the users save state and what not if i dont use a game engine? and if not, what can i make it in? just javascript and c#?

 

[pepplez]

is it going to be a lot more work to keep the users save state and what not if i dont use a game engine? and if not, what can i make it in? just javascript and c#?

Why not try out Renpy?

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It's really easy to create a game that contains text and images, saving/loading are all things you don't have to worry about because the engine does it all by itself. download the sdk and play "The question" change the text and images and your VN is ready. I tried it myself and was amazed. Unfortunately, I have no talent for writing or drawing haha

Edit: Dang! I misread your post, sorry!

 

[anne O'nymous]

is it going to be a lot more work to keep the users save state

This is would be the easiest part of your development journey.

and if not, what can i make it in? just javascript and c#?

A language you're comfortable enough with, because you'll have tons of code to write with it.

 

[osanaiko]

Do you want to make a game, or make a game engine?

Because unless you are a skilled programmer with lots of free time, AND have an obsession to make a game which will need an entire second lot of free time, you 100% will only succeed at one of those. If we talk about doing one or the other... then making a game is still far far less work than making a game platform.

Renpy just celebrated it's 20th aniversary. It has 15500 commits in the repo. There's 44 individual committers over the course of the development. Renpytom literally works on it full time.

Granted, it's a more complex platform than Twine, but that's still a lot of work that has gone into it. Let's imagine Twine is only 20% as complex as renpy... do you have 4 years to do 3000 commits to make an equivalent platform?

In fact, let's look at twine's history... the precursor "tweebox" was first released as an interactive html game runtime in 2007. The current Twine GH repo has almost 3000 commits (haha, close to the above estimate!).

Making your own game engine is madness. Your honor, I rest my case.

 

[kinrean]

i think your Q should be what is a game engine, a game engine simple put it just a libraries of tool. you can make all the tool your self, but if you even need to ask this kind of Q i don't think you are skill enough to make all of the tool . and don't forget one of the tool you need is to be link/play in window , mac, or any OS you want to put it on. and tool that read image file.

in another word most of the time you will be using other people tool too even if you make your game engine.

 

[peterppp]

no offense but if you have to ask that, perhaps you aren't skilled enough to make a game from scratch yourself. not that you can't learn as you go but still. why not use twine if you're considering doing something similar? you can modify it to your liking. that would be far easier and quicker than making something from scratch

not sure why there is so much confusion in the thread about him asking to make a game or a game engine. he says he wants to make a game... but without using a game engine.

 

[that_vn_programmer]

I am currently in the process of making a simple VN Engine made on top of Unity using Ink as a basis for dialog, personally I have been developing games 10+ years. But never touched a Visual Novel type of game. So it's a good exercise for me to get some experience. But probably if you want a fully fledged game it takes a lot of work, as it is with any game out there

Building it from scratch requires you to have heavy knowledge on creating a simple game enige yourself first. It's easier to build on top of an existing proven game engine. This would save you tons and tons of work.

Its a fun endeavor building your own VN engine I wish you good luck

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to see a small sample in action

 

[aereton]

Well, grab your favourite language + IDE and start making a small-scale console based text adventure first, without all the extra jazz like saving states or images, to get an idea how to organize and code your game loops. Add user input and branching paths in there for good measure.

This will give you plenty opportunity to learn how to structure your games. After that project, go for further goals like saving and loading, having an actual user interface, etc.

 

[anne O'nymous]

not sure why there is so much confusion in the thread about him asking to make a game or a game engine. he says he wants to make a game... but without using a game engine.

Because you can't make a game without a game engine.

He'll not write something like

FNCT scene1
    PRINT "1) Call girl1."
    PRINT "2) Go to class."

    while 1
        key = INPUT  KEYBOARD
        IF key == '1'
            CALL scene1_a
       ELSE IF key == "2"
            CALL scene1_b

every single time he have to present a choice. Instead he'll have a "menu ( CHOICE LIST )" function, that will return the said choice. And the same will apply for any single functionality in his game.

Each time he'll come to a particular secondary feature, like by example applying an effect to an image or a text, he'll start by write the code inside the scene function.
Then he'll want to use that feature a second time, and go back to his code, to turn it into a function.
Then he'll want to use a feature really similar, and go back again to his code, in order to make the function a bit more flexible, for it to also handle that variation. What mean that he'll also have to change the two previous call for that function.
And so on, until he have a fully generic function that will cover a lot of variations.

So, perhaps that it will be a one shoot game engine, and perhaps that it will have the form of a library, but it will be a game engine. And he'll pass around 75% of his development time working on it, and only 25% of the time working on the game itself.
Unless he's purely dedicated, and really want to make one or the other, after a year he'll be discouraged, because neither the game, nor the engine, really advance.

 

[aereton]

Unless he's purely dedicated, and really want to make one or the other, after a year he'll be discouraged, because neither the game, nor the engine, really advance.

Text based games are one of the most primate form of games though. It's not like he's looking to implement his own 3d scene editor or whatnot. Text adventures were the starting projects of many developers starting out back in the days for a reason.

I agree it's smart to use tools that are available to you to make it easier and faster, however from a learning standpoint a game as he has in mind is the ideal starting point.

 

[anne O'nymous]

Text based games are one of the most primate form of games though. It's not like he's looking to implement his own 3d scene editor or whatnot. Text adventures were the starting projects of many developers starting out back in the days for a reason.

But they don't necessarily come with less features.
I should still have a text based game I made in Perl. 95% of the code is for the engine, the game itself mostly being text and JSON files. I finished it, but only because coding is my job, so I knew beforehand what I would need and globally wrote the game before I started the engine.

I agree it's smart to use tools that are available to you to make it easier and faster, however from a learning standpoint a game as he has in mind is the ideal starting point.

And what game do he have in mind ? Because he said nothing about this.

 

[peterppp]

Because you can't make a game without a game engine.

He'll not write something like

FNCT scene1
    PRINT "1) Call girl1."
    PRINT "2) Go to class."

    while 1
        key = INPUT  KEYBOARD
        IF key == '1'
            CALL scene1_a
       ELSE IF key == "2"
            CALL scene1_b

every single time he have to present a choice. Instead he'll have a "menu ( CHOICE LIST )" function, that will return the said choice. And the same will apply for any single functionality in his game.

Each time he'll come to a particular secondary feature, like by example applying an effect to an image or a text, he'll start by write the code inside the scene function.
Then he'll want to use that feature a second time, and go back to his code, to turn it into a function.
Then he'll want to use a feature really similar, and go back again to his code, in order to make the function a bit more flexible, for it to also handle that variation. What mean that he'll also have to change the two previous call for that function.
And so on, until he have a fully generic function that will cover a lot of variations.

So, perhaps that it will be a one shoot game engine, and perhaps that it will have the form of a library, but it will be a game engine. And he'll pass around 75% of his development time working on it, and only 25% of the time working on the game itself.
Unless he's purely dedicated, and really want to make one or the other, after a year he'll be discouraged, because neither the game, nor the engine, really advance.

of course if you define game engine like that, and i don't disagree with that definition, pretty much every game you make from scratch means also creating a game engine for that game. but since he specified not using a game engine, i assumed the meaning here would be a reusable game engine, as in making a new twine. i may have browsed through the other answers too quickly and misunderstood

 

[anne O'nymous]

i assumed the meaning here would be a reusable game engine, as in making a new twine.

It's surely what he meant, but what you misunderstood in the answer is, at least form my point of view, the reason why they pointed to the game engine. As I read them, they tend more on my side (anyway you'll have to write something that will looks like one) than pointing to the creation of the next Ren'Py.

This said, creating your game on top of your own game engine isn't necessarily a bad thing. After all, it's how Ren'Py started 20 years ago ; a small engine for someone who wanted to make a VN. And it's now one of the most used, it not the most used, when it come to VN and VN-like.