Hey guys,

hope to find some advice here. I'm an artist and i love drawing. But since years and years i wanted to create a video game. I have many ideas, but since i haven't a whole team i have make the 3d models low poly and not photo realistic cause that will save me time. I have created simple tutorial games in unreal and it's funny and i like it. But the problem is, i don't know if it's managable for one person to create a concept inside this engine. 
1. the time
2. to get the neccessary know how (cause i don't know if there is a tutorial for any of the features i like to implement, and I don't expect to find one for any of these.
The 3d models and textures are not the most time consuming thing. I'm relativly experienced in blender and environment is not the problem. characters will be a little struggle but i will get it.

Thought about Unreal 4 or Unity as an engine. Unreal will be better i think, unity is a good engine but for the things I want to do it's relativly limited at some edges i believe...
To show that i have a concept, here is what i need:

-Third person camera (check)
-Lock on system (it works, but haven't find a tutorial yet)
-Combat System similiar to Dark Souls/The Witcher 3 (but i don't wanna compete with them or let it look exactly like this) Exact hit system is the important thing...
-Changeable weapons and armors (not many, not out of the inventory)
-Unarmed fight/Fight with weapon change
-I don't need a quest log, but something like world events happening, influenced by the player
-I need an inventory, but only defined slots, one for item x, one for item y, one for item z. If they are blocked, no other item can be added and the player has to drop sth, or slots that can be used only for a single item in game, that is available only once.
-system that gives my player the ability to take weapons directly from the ground and start fighting with it.
-Vendor System, buy items for the inventory slots for x amount of Gold/whatever
-Looting System from chests like in Zelda 

(Optional, i don't know if it's doable and if it's not to much)
-Jumping/Climbing System
-Riding System

For the 3d models i'm doing concept arts right know but i don't know if it is doable for me alone at all

I know your answers: you can't do it under 20 years. It's frustrating.I got all this ideas but i can't get them into a game. And no one can help cause the half of the community base don't even know how to do all this things for themselves cause it seems so complicated to evolve all this "video game standards" from scratch.

But any tips? Any suggestions how it can be realized?
Is another egnine eventually better?
Are there tools to save time? I will be ready to spend money on this solutions cause i want to bring my ideas on screen!
If it is not doable, i will break down, cry, and begin to sell my models in the engine asset stores and hope that some other people can create something cool with it.  

Thanks @ all people who can answer me

Nothing in your list of stuff is impossible to do as a single developer. Similar things have been done before by solo devs. However, relying upon finding tutorials to help you accomplish all of the tasks probably isn't feasible. Your immediate goal should be to learn enough about design, development, patterns and techniques that you can reason your way to solutions on your own, rather than rely on tutorials to hold your hand the whole way through it. The best way to learn those patterns and techniques is to build smaller games. Even if they are not games that you ever release, they will still teach you a lot of the things you need to know to build larger projects.

Sounds good, thank you :DD
But: For me it's extremely hard to see the parallels between a simple game that looks like from a 3 year old boy (ok most of the time there are crappy animations that flicker at any time the character moves) and a game ready combat system. All of this stuff i have learned til now doesn't help me, or at least i don't see how to use it that way.

Are there Tutorials for UE4 to learn the simple things what i need to figure out what i can do to reach my goal? Don't mind if that's only patterns. But all that beginner stuff don't help a lot...  I don't want to be greedy but all the beginner videos show the simpliest solution for a battle system or a camera system. After that i can set up a third person camera or can give my character a weapon. But after that...

I don't know what exactly can help they give me no patterns you know?  Maybe i have to practice more cause the connections don't seem to happen right now

Maybe it's good to start and asking precisely for concrete problems with one of the features?

The basic building block of competency is strong familiarity with the language. You only get that with practice and experience, just like with any other skill. With skill and competency comes the ability to solve ever more complex problems. (And an RPG of any significant scale and scope is a quite complex problem.) A child doesn't start out running marathons; she starts out crawling first, then walking a few steps. Similarly, you won't be building that Dark Souls or Witcher 3-like RPG anytime soon, not until you've learned to run.

Tutorials can only get you so far, are very frequently of poor quality, and are a very poor substitute for basic competency. A tutorial is tantamount to that child using a chair to hold herself up in a standing position. In order to build the RPG you envision, you MUST get past the "I need a tutorial to teach me this" stage. You have to be able to reason about and design and construct solutions on your own, and there just aren't any tutorials for that.

Ok, think i have to break up on this. 

I may be a better artist. video game programming is only frustrating for me cause i can't get the shit from the paper on to screen.
There is something not compatible and there you got an error. searching for 2 hours for a work around, finally got it but for what?

in the end the only thing that comes out for me:
1. the complex game i have in my mind ist too much coding and work for me.
2. the simplier jump'n'run game i could come up with in terms of coding is ok, i can realize these kind of game.
But I want to put so much detail in to compensate the "lack of gameplay complexity" that exists in my mind for this kind of games that it is a real struggle to animate it... I can create a fantastic looking main character, but bringing it to life....

So in the essence i have much ideas but no skill. And to learn how to get it on screen i need time i can't afford.
If i want to put a simple good looking jump'n'run i need ~6 years to even got a character that MOVES cause i have to draw him in 234345 different poses.

But thank you for all your tips

Any idea how i can participate in creating games? If i can't do it all alone caqn i become a part of it?

You could start by writing very simple games. When people ask about how and what I keep suggesting the following:

Take a simple game: 4Wins, Tic Tac Toe or Battleship.

Decide up on a programming language you want to learn/use in order to write the game - It can be a mix of languages later, but you should start with one first. Could be C, C++, C#, Pascal, Python, that's really up to you.

Then you start by writing your game for the little command line window, text output only.

You will learn about text input and output, how to read from the keyboard and how to print your things on screen, probably reading and writing from files and to files.

Once your - let's say Tic Tac Toe - works, because you figured out the game logic before, you extend your existing game. You could add a little menu, where you could select from "New Game", "Options", "Highscore", "Exit". New Game starts a new round, inside Options you could modify the text colour, highscore lists all your previous games and sorts them by the moves it took to win the game or something similar, and Exit returns to your OS.

Once that works, you could introduce different game modes, Player vs Player, Player vs Computer, Computer vs Computer, maybe as a sub menu in the New Game menu

Once that works, you could jump from a console window to something more sophisticated, 2D sprites, textures, colourful backgrounds. Either by handcrafting all the glue required for that or by using some existing libraries or frameworks like SDL, sfml, freeglut, plain old windows GDI+ or the linux/mac counterparts.

Once you got that working, why not add music? Background music, Sounds for placing Xs and Os, Win/Loss, Menu music.

Once that works, make the game more interesting, Fiddle with modes like the player only has ten/three/two/one seconds to decide on a spot to put his X or O or the game will be lost.

As the counter runs down, the music could become more dramatic

Once that works, why not look at networking. Players of your great game could gather in a lobby, with little chat rooms where they can just hang and talk about great Tic Tac Toe games from the past, or plan tactics on how to defeat certain players or computers. You probable need a new menu for that where you can start a game or join a game of some sort. Eventually you might add some matchmaking system taking rank and other aspects into account for people to play together. Maybe even have some ladder system, game of hall or similar.

Depending wether you want your game to be 2D or 3D you could level up the dimensions of your game now. and make it a 3D Game. The battlefield becomes 3D and more plastic, instead of sprites you might use real objects, models.

While writing that, I got another idea. If you add networking, players could even provide their own little figurine (sprite/model) to be used while rendering the playground instead of the default ones (could be an optional setting somewhere)

Of course you don't write all that within a week. But you can create little tasks out of those chunks. Tasks which can be easily achieved and keep you motivated as you see yourself progressing. Create a little todo.txt, or create a project on those sites like GitHub, BitBucket, Gitlab . They all come with a ticketsystem, where you can organise your todos if you prefer that over a simple textfile.

When you are stuck somewhere you grab your little duck and talk to it/her/him, listen to what he/she/it tells you or debug your things which don't work. If you can't figure it out, you join us here and ask for help.

I hope any of what I said above makes any sense to anyone.

Thank you, very nice answer. Thinking you're right. But since i have no interest in "Tix Tac Toe"-like Games at all i will break up on this. It's not worth the time for me, to create games that I would never play

It makes sense and you're completly right. So i think I'm out here. Thx for your help. Maybe I'm trying to get into concept art...

The usual excuse : )

Please, please, please, please do not give up!

Tic Tac Toe and the likes were just examples. Very simple ones to get you started with programming and to understand how this and that works, so that you know how to tackle more complex things - maybe a Jump'N'Run, a Mario clone, or some FlappyBird thing or complete different genre.

When you start learning something new, you can't just expect to be an expert within an hour. But whatever you do, try to break it up in smaller tasks/steps, to keep the complexity low and the motivation up.

I'm new to game development too, and I focus more on the programming. I have to say when you think a game is easy to do, it's not. Things you didn't think in the start will do start appearing and you'll want to implement them to make it better, and as you do it, you'll see how much you did learn and it was worth it that you spent time working on it before something else, because you would feel overwhelmed and probably quit. Hope it helps.

13 hours ago, Zlux said:

Thank you, very nice answer. Thinking you're right. But since i have no interest in "Tix Tac Toe"-like Games at all i will break up on this. It's not worth the time for me, to create games that I would never play

It makes sense and you're completly right. So i think I'm out here. Thx for your help. Maybe I'm trying to get into concept art...

The point in creating games like Tic Tac Toe is not because it's a game you will like or play later, it builds the foundation for future games. Take a Chef for example, you don't see people learning to cook go from a basic soup to making six course grand TV worthy meals right away, it takes a strong foundation and a lot of time.

Based on all your posts in the thread you're looking for an easy way to create games hand in hand with your artistic skills. You have a few options:

1. Join a team of programmers looking for an artist

2. Pay money and hire a programmer to make your 'dream' game while you create the visual side

3. Learn Blueprints with UE4 (Still requires logical thinking of how things go together).

4. Stick with 2D games and use GameMaker Studio 2

I wouldn't recommend learning to code if you're already at the stage where you're not willing to go through those mundane tasks in order to develop the skill sets to make future games. Stick to what you know, and find a team or individual programmer to help you out. Not everyone is fit for this and there is nothing wrong with that. It took me several years to be able to program my own real full featured RPG, and I've been at this for 15+ years. Programming in general takes a lot of time to learn the craft, and is not something people pick up within a few months.