Hey, I'd like to develop an FMV game.

I know C++ and basic calculus math.

Any advice on where to get started?

I want it to be where there's no load times for most of the game

What's your goal? Do you want to to create the engine, or simple make the game? Do you have any experience in making games?

At the most basic level, a FMV game requires a video player and some buttons/clickable widgets. Any tools capable of playing videos should be enough, but you might need to convert the videos, depending on the supported formats.

If you just want to make the game (and not an engine), you can try using a visual novel engine like TyranoBuilder or Ren'Py.

I only have experience with making terminal based games.

I'll check those engines out and see if they work well enough for my future game, and then get back to you.

I think I'll build the engine myself.

Copied from the PM you sent:

PhotoRealisticGraphics said:
You were mentioning video tools for making a game. Can you give some examples? Besides flash for various reasons.

Not video tools. Any tool capable of video playback and creating interfaces (programmable UI widgets, like buttons). For example, in Visual Studio and using C#, you can create a normal application that plays videos, and it obviously allows you to create buttons and other controls, so you can create a fmv-like game in it.

Many modern IDE's/SDK's (like QtCreator, JavaFX), also have enough components for that, so you can choose any of them and see if you like them. And you can also use game engines like Unity and Unreal, for the same reason.

PhotoRealisticGraphics said:
Any advice on where to get started?

…

I think I'll build the engine myself.

A skills assessment seems in order. Ask yourself instead: What DON'T you know that you will need?

Do you know how to play video? That's a critical component, if you don't know it already, you'll need to learn it. There are lots of ways to do it, and plenty of tools that can do it.

Do you know how to create the components for your game in those tools? For example, how to put together the chain of movies, how to put together inventories or stories or whatever pieces you need? If not, you'll need to learn those.

If you're going to write an engine rather than a game, what do you already know about engine development? What skills do you lack?

If your goal is to be a movie director and put together movies using pre-existing tools, there are several FMV game engines out there which already do all the work, you merely must drop your movies in the tool and provide the connecting bits. If your goal is to write a game from scratch using nothing more than the Window API, you'll have many more things starting with how to create a display window and how to respond to system events. Or maybe with your skills assessment you may need to learn how to write code in the first place.

One option is to learn as you go. You'll learn a wider range of stuff, including a lot of stuff that won't immediately solve your problem, but it is a common approach. It also has a high failure rate. Just open the tools at hand, ask yourself what is your next step, and start leveraging tutorials and your tools to work toward that first step, then the second, then the third…

The actual coding of a FMV game is trivial. Any halfway competent should be able to create a working prototype in a week or so, most of which is spent learning the technologies involved. The hardest part by far is writing the script and creating the actual video clips. Do you have a plan for the script and the video clips?

I'm not sure, maybe it won't help you. But I have a suggestion. You can make this game on Powerpoint. I make a Choose Your Adventure game. Actually, if I had real videos I would do a FMV. I used “Monkey's Paw” story. And I wrote some alternative scenes. I prepared images, scenes by storyboardthat.com. After that, I combined all of parts of game in a Powerpoint file. Here is my game if you want to take a look. Download and play the presentation.

It's true lightbreeze, I finished 90% of my prototype a couple weeks ago. Unity ended up working fairly well, although it was annoying to figure out how to make it fast. I'll need to buy a camera since phones are shit for taking footage, especially they aren't in the correct 16 by 9 aspect ratio and are rotated. My game won't be story focused but will be all about puzzle gameplay and visuals. I'm not out to make a “Plumbers don't wear ties” clone but a horror game.

PhotoRealisticGraphics said:
Unity ended up working fairly well, although it was annoying to figure out how to make it fast.

I'm glad you opted for Unity. That would seem to be the sensible option if you want flexibility and to focus more on the design elements of the game rather than building systems.

Can you elaborate on how you went about making it fast?