I’m trying to make a pocket pet game, like the evolution of all the little calculator screened toys in the 90’s and 00’s. I don’t want it to be the whale hunting, spyware riddled garbage that most phone games are. I’d rather like to release it on F-Droid instead of Google if I release it at all. I have all of it worked out on paper, from the random tables to the creature stats, to the combat mechanics, you can play it as a pen and paper if you wanted to. Problem is, I’m a pen and paper guy, and I’m having an awful time trying to learn anything about code. Where do I go to get help with this?
Three things based on other comments here:
(1) <name of game engine> is free, try that!
Be wary with this. They may be free for students or small deployment situations, but may have increasingly agressive demands as your user base increases in size or your seek some kind of profitability. I wouldn’t panic about, but do make sure to carefully review the licensing terms for ALL tools that you use in your process.
(2) Learning/Tutorials
Depends a bit on how you learn best. Youtube almost always has some good instructional videos. Most of the major tool/engine makers have large libraries of tutorials to draw from as well. Even very experienced programmers routinely have dozens of browser tabs that start from web searches that read “<name of my game engine/platform> how to do <specific thing I want to do>”.
(3) If you look to hire or contract out some of the work, just realize that you will very often only get what you really pay for. Quality work costs more. One option you have is to spend the next year or three doing everything you can yourself. Get as close to complete as you can. Then go to something like Kickstarter and look for completion funds. “Look at how complete the game is. If I can just get a little bit of money, I can hire a professional <whatever> to do that one part that I couldn’t do myself”. This is especially usual for getting access to skills like art, music, voice acting, etc.
In my own experience, i would do #3, then take that and do# 2 after reviewing different #1s
If the code you pay for makes a game that does something close to what you wanted, you then have that to work with and go on.
(I don’t know if this is how things work in the real world so please forgive if it’s not quite right)
Use it like an alpha or pre alpha build, and as a reference for how the coding can be used to do different things but specifically for your project.
It may be a horror show to try and fix someone else’s code, but for someone who doesn’t know already, it would be very useful as a learning environment that was created uniquely for your project, and then you start asking/looking for very specific help
You could then post snippets and ask about anything that you struggling with, or even use AI to explain it(that may be terrible or it may not be, you can let me know lol)
(I’m not a programmer, but i took a class in highschool, 25 years ago and did a couple things with logowriter, and turbopascal)