Hello I was wondering if I can be an indie game developer and publish a game without knowing code?
I am a team of one. I plan to start a game company and publish a game on steam.
With all the tools available these days is learning code really necessary? I am not against learning it but all the time it will take me to learn C# I could be spending that time on furthering my knowledge of Unity and Blender etc…
Cheers.
Sure, its not the easiest path but you can do it. Visual Scripting is quite powerful these days and there are quite a few solutions for it on the Asset Store.
It isn’t a crutch for not knowing how to properly design logic systems or good gameplay though.
Imho you vastly overestimate the time it would take you to learn a bit of C# (You don’t have to know everything about it before you get use out of it. You can learn it as you go along and solve one little problem after the other). I can very well see you wasting a lot of time trying to accomplish something that would be rather easy to code by fumbling around with a visual scripting solution that might end up not being capable of doing the exact thing you want to get done. Sure, code looks scary to non-programmers, but compared to getting good at gamedesign or doing great art I find it to be one of the easier parts of making a game. Give coding a try and then re-evaluate if you want to focus more on learning that or looking for other solutions or combine both.
You might want to adjust the title of your question. Because the answer to that question is “sure, programmers are just one of the roles in game development” but your actual question is slightly different.
Someone needs to programme your game at some point. You can employ a contractor if you like.
Alternatively you can use a visual programming tool like PlayMaker. There is about as much learning with visual scripting as there is with code scripting.
I think you should learn to code, even if you want to be a game designer, at some point you will want to be able to just modify simple scripts etc.
I’d say in order to develop games worth playing you would need a rudimentary knowledge of every facet of development- if only so that you are aware what is possible and what is biting off more than you can chew. In starting out, the worst thing you can do is to get bogged down in an over-ambitious project.
I’ve got playmaker & for some things it is quicker/easier than coding but I found that understanding how to do basic coding helped me work out what I needed to put into playmaker & in what order the stuff needed to be done. That said, I suck at coding but still rarely use playmaker as it meant trying to learn 2 things instead of just 1 (coding, I’m ignoring art, sound etc as they are on the long list of things to work towards)