Many of you have heard the question before ...
... Let's start with ... I am now 59 years old. Since high school (1970's) I've wanted to design my own RPG game. The project has grown in my head from something interesting to something extremely complex (the same game). What I need help in is to choose the right game engine to begin this work. My foundation of knowledge is out of the 1970's BASIC programming that was taught in many high schools at the time; I am aware that coding structure; and languages has changed over the years; and that game engines are more intuitive as some are 'plug and test' systems. I've also gained some basic animation theory over the years; and at some point I'ld like to explore 3D creature rendering.. I know that this project is NOT an overnight project.
I am on an Apple Mac Mini. Recently I've thought that maybe the best way to get started is to begin simply by developing a crawler type game (Brogue would be a good example) and work the variants up from there; and then move over to a 2D tile variant (like Dungeon Crawl - Stone Soup). The longer term goal is to create a gaming environment that is 3D multiplayer (limited numbers) to finally evolve up to an open playing environment with much larger numbers of persons. These later worlds would be quite random and hyper-dynamic.
So the question is ... what game style ought i start with, and what game engine should I use? I'm alive and kicking now, but life only lasts so long!
Peter Kelley - St. Paul, MN USA