First of all, I want to greet everyone with my first post on this amazing forum!

And the question, actually is (please, don't judge strictly)...

Say, I have a GDD (which I'm working on now) of a first-person adventure game with puzzles and quests elements in a detective genre for a PC platform. As I can see from my perspective, the road ahead is quite long and windy, but let's assume that the GDD is ready. What is the best way to create a Proof-Of-Concept, or a simple Prototype if I don't have proper skills of an artist and currently have a pretty low budget? Is there any engines with free or relatively cheap templates for what I want to do? I have programming skills on a high level, but I don't want to spend much time on coding and concentrate more on storytelling and game design.

Is there a way to deal with this taking into account my current limitations, or does the next step (post-GDD step) requires building a team yet?

Thank you!

You'll probably want to use something like Unity or Unreal then.  Unity has a pretty huge community and a lot of free assets you can prototype with.  Unreal has a lot of plusses too, but they are fairly different.  I've only used Unity myself, and you can as a single developer make almost anything with it, as a prototype at least.

Try them out both are free/have fully functional free versions.

2 hours ago, Pavel Svetlichny said:

Is there any engines

Not a Game Design question. Moving to other forum.

There are two main paths you could take at that stage.

1.  You could do as @Septopus suggested and choose one of the popular general purpose engines such as Unreal or Unity.  These are very capable engines, you can use them for free to prototype or get started (and they're also very indie-friendly if you want to continue to make the real product), and because they're popular there are lots of resources and people willing to help.  By making use of free assets, you can make a prototype relatively quickly to try out your idea, and then go from there if you want to replace those assets with originals, start from scratch, or however you want to proceed.

2.  You could mod an existing commercial game that is at least somewhat similar to what you want to create.  If you choose the right game, some of them come with very capable tools (in some cases the same tools used by the developers!) and can often have active communities around creating and playing mods.  This can sometimes be a quicker path than starting with a general purpose engine, but license details vary on what you can do with your mod, so in some cases, you might want to change engines after the prototyping phase if you're planning a commercial game.  

Thank you, guys!

I'll start with trying out game engines first. This was my first intention, but I was wondering of other possibilities.