If you want to make a 2D Zelda style game, there's the Solaris engine, which is purpose built for that very task.

It's open-source and completely free to use.

I haven't used it that much (never even done a jam with it). The weird licensing of the editor rubs me the wrong way, and IIRC it even has some telemetry enabled by default. That's kind of a red flag when you consider the engine came from King, a mobile game developer. I don't think I want to trust them, but other people might not care.

But I do like the design of the engine. Message passing is actually a great pattern in general, and it's used by other engines like O3DE to great effect. It does take some getting used to though, and I personally never was a fan of Lua. If you've ever done any Objective C or Swift, it'll be familiar. It provides a way to build decoupled systems effortlessly, and long-term keeps your codebase flexible and maintainable, which is exactly what you want for a game that needs to constantly evolve its design throughout development.

based on my anecdotal experience your comment sounds rather biased.

That's called an opinion. Usually, you can identify those when someone writes something like "I don't like it"

Godot's easy to use, that's its strength. Past that, it is riddled with issues. A lot of APIs are either poorly designed, half-implemented, or outright broken. The engine has terrible extensibility support due to a shitty build system, which is why you need to download a separate build of the engine if you want C# support. Third party native plugins like Spine also require a custom build of the engine to deal with this (want to use multiple third party "plugins"? Start learning C++ and scons so you can glue them together yourself). The internal organization of the code is sloppy, and while understandable due to it initially being a one-man project, the situation has not improved despite the massive increase in volunteers and money it has had over the years. There's a lot of bike shedding that goes on, and leadership doesn't seem to have a clear vision of where to take the engine.

GDScript sucks. The events system sucks. The hierarchical entity design sucks (although the nestable scenes helps smooth that over). Godot physics sucks. Jolt physics is better, but the integration sucks (Try making joints. The only reliable one is the 6DOF joint, but that requires you to fiddle with dozens of parameters to try and achieve what you want). A lot of the rendering features suck and/or are broken, even basic things like static lighting and shadowmaps fall apart with basic geometry. Everything is buggy as hell, and that's something you just need to accept if you're going to make games with it.

I don't hate Godot, and I do use it because of its main strength: ease of use. It's my go-to for game jams and prototyping, and I have used it a lot. But if I'm going to invest serious time/effort into a project, I'm not going to disadvantage myself right out the gate by choosing Godot.

Unreal 2.5 is so old

Hey, I also had a look at Unity in 2015, which is where my opinion comes from.

Oh god, I'm old. You might as well have said

Looks over here, he used the grandpas engines!

... that metalocalypse reference is almost 20 years old.

Good thing I'm going to the doctors tomorrow to learn more about my borderline glaucoma and how it might relate to my blood pressure issues.

I'm fucking old man 👴😭

Unreal 2.5 is so old, your perception of engines is probably way outdated. Things are so much easier and more cohesive now, you'll definitely enjoy modern gamedev tools. Since you're already an experienced programmer you should be up and running with Godot in only an hour, there's a tutorial in the official documentation that you can skim. You can probably look into a Godot crash course video on youtube too for a quick overview.

Are you looking for a framework or a game engine? You talk about frameworks in the post but it sounds like you actually want something that does everything for you, which is more in line with engines. There are a lot of 2D engines out there like Godot, Unity, GameMaker etc. that are all pretty easy to use.

From my perspective it's a matter of scale. I've worked with "things" that are bare bones like OpenGL and Direct X, and complete (but old) like Unreal 2.5. I'm using the terms interchangably to mean "something that has covered the nuts and bolts of game development so I can focus on customizations and the actual game development, and leverages my skills as a programmer, while being as quick to get started on as possible"

So any solution, from a generic project in eclipse/vs code using pre defined libraries (as long as when I hit compile there is a player character I can move about) to a custom program that shows me a level editor with scripts I can attach to "pawns" are acceptable levels of soutions.

I kinda get what they are saying. They want an intuitive template with good documentation. Most Unity and Unreal templates are like "here you go" with no real direction or instruction on how to use them. Or, like they said, the template is folders of folders, layers of layers.

Im sure these exist, but the more useful something is, the higher the price. I dont pay for templates, so I get what is available for free.

There are a ton of good game engines out there. If you're making a 2D zelda-like, your best options are probably things like Gamemaker , LÖVE2D , or Godot. If you want to make it real tiny you could even make it in PICO-8.

Unity is a classic for these things but I found it cumbersome to use for the while I did, especially for 2D games, and many people stopped using Unity as their game engine after the pricing issue.

My personal recommendation is Godot. I spent a long time using Unreal Engine, Unity, and Gamemaker, but ultimately Godot is the only engine that clicked with me. It's not everyone's preference and that's okay, but I do recommend it after using it for multiple years.

You specifically point out wanting to get started pretty fast with it, paint tiles and get moving, and I'm not aware of any game engines that will get you the exact thing you want out-of-the-box without also imposing incredible limitations, it will all take some amount of setup and custom code to get started. Godot can get you pretty close and pretty fast.

There's a tutorial series by Heartbeast, Godot 4 Action RPG on doing pretty much this exact thing in Godot 4. (Sorry, I couldn't find a version of that video on a federated platform, so youtube link)

No matter what you choose, I hope you show us what you make! Good luck with it all!

I just want something that will say : here’s your main, here’s your player character, we’ve taken care of the collision detection and inputs and rendering, there’s no gravity. Paint the tiles on this screen, and get going.

Are you looking for a framework or a game engine? You talk about frameworks in the post but it sounds like you actually want something that does everything for you, which is more in line with engines. There are a lot of 2D engines out there like Godot, Unity, GameMaker etc. that are all pretty easy to use.

I used Unity in the past but am mostly a Godot fan nowadays. Try Godot, it might be what you're looking for.

What is this 'everything else' you speak of regarding Godot? I've been using the engine for years, based on my anecdotal experience your comment sounds rather biased.

I've never used it, but https://www.rpgmakerweb.com/ might be what you are looking for

• HaxeFlixel is a popular choice for 2D stuff. You can use it with Tiled or LDTK for level editing. This sounds more like what you're looking for

• Defold might interest you as it has a full editor built in, though I've barely used it so don't ask if it's good

• Gamemaker is a classic, but idk what pricing is like nowadays

• Godot will work, but I don't like it. Once you get past the highly polished editor, everything else kinda sucks

Not OP, but I would more Noclip, Ahoy and HBGuy channels yes!

Are you looking for more game documentary makers or perhaps something else? I can give you some suggestions either way.

Cool, thanks for the post, found a new channel to subscribe to.

This is why i dont have a hobby. Every time i tried to get a hobby, i just lost interest to things before i got an inspiration to contiune do what i want to do. Game development happened to be last thing i tried to get get hobby of, and when i finally decided to do something with me losing interest to potential hobbies.

I am interested in many other things, and tried to get hobby of some of them, and same thing happened every time. Game development happened to be the last thing i tried to get hobby of, and when i finally decided that i have to do something with me stopping doing progress on things i want to do.

I already though about it recently. I think i need to know if i am adhd, and do something with it if i am actually is.

I had the idea of a game i wanted to make for a long time, and after think about it, i knew most stuff and skills i had to learn to make it. Of course i didnt want to make it perfect at once. I wanted to make the most basic version of what seemed like this game, and throughout the time upgrading it where i think something is missing, or something can be done better.

Inspiration seems like a thing i am missing out on. Like i know what i want to do, i am just not inspired to actually do it.

The bad discipline is what really holding me back. I tried to fix it by various ways, but it all comes down to that nobody is watching me. If there is nobody to tell me that i am not doing what i have to do, i have no iniciative to follow alarms, schedules and other stuff, because nothing bad happens when i dont.

What you are saying about of torturing myself when i do stuff which is not fun, this is not exactly what you understand. There is boring and repetitive stuff which i really did not like doing. But most stuff i personnaly tried to get into is fun. Its just my laziness which overcomes the fun, and i dont know how to get away from it.

That doesn't really solve the issue for me considering I have even less motivation for some of those other things (writing/comics), or I've tried them with small successes that didn't go anywhere (music, stand-alone art, even a finished simple prototype program related to writing).

I have thought about animation*, but that is probably just as high of a bar if not higher in terms of effort and thinking up a viable idea. Something like a desktop pet maybe, though I am stuck on functionality. In a similar vein an OLED screensaver-type thing (or music visualizer?) is another idea, but I don't have the screen (aside from an old phone that I'm not sure would work, plus exporting overhead).

* which is only a slight deviation for the workflow I've been tinkering with, just with very little simple scripting needed (really only initially)

Take pressure off. Don't set targets, just solve one problem and if you're fed up, park it. If you feel good, solve or investigate another.

Avoid negative pressure and burn out. Little and often is the process. If you don't want to touch it one day, don't. It's cool.

I just cant find myself doing some work, like learning something new, for longer than two weeks.

So, what can you recommend me to do,

It's the same kind of discipline issue everyone has with other times with sports or other kinds of regular practice.

Reserve the time, "get there early", sit down, set an alarm if you have to and when the alarm rings you open your project and go from there.

You don't have to torture yourself though, if you find you're actually not having fun, it's fine to just do small prototype things and switch things up every two weeks.

I find the best way to learn things I want to learn is with a project.
Don't learn game dev to be able to create a game. Learn game dev to craft the story you want to tell.

If you don't have a story or project that you are passionate enough to see through to a released game, then maybe try and get involved in someone else's project.

Or, put what you've learned in your back pocket. Maybe you have done enough on that for now, and it's time to try some other area of programming or even learn some completely different skills.
Maybe one day you will have a strike of inspiration for a game and you will already have some basic knowledge and ability to see if it will work.