I want to make a simple card game that utilizes mostly nice looking menus but not very complicated in terms of game play (just comparing values to see which is larger and determine based on that). I want to know any tips people would have or suggestions as to what engine would be the best to do this on? Note I only want to make this for personal use and I have little coding experience and half decent Photoshop experience.
Unity is probably your best bet, given the new GUI system they have will make things much easier for you to edit (especially given your Photoshop experience), look up a few tutorials on the GUI system and you should be good to go
The new GUI features are indeed much better for this than the old ones were. I was playing around with them last night to do some quick testing on my project, and was able to get a couple of buttons set up quickly and easily, complete with interactions and efficient scaling for different displays. Took less than 10 minutes, and I’m not even very experienced at using the new UI.
Gameplay would be a more difficult hurdle, especially if you only know a little coding. While you can lean on some of Unity’s built-in components for a lot of different tasks, game logic will require some coding.
I still think Unity would be a pretty good fit for you. The kind of gameplay you’re describing wouldn’t be that difficult. I managed to throw together a triple-triad prototype in Unity without that much difficulty. And that was when I was just starting out using it.
Sounds like this could be done without much code. You can learn the basics of coding in the learn section. But if you still can’t grasp it, or you want to build something more complex, you can always hire people to fill in the gaps in your abilities. Plenty of competent coders and artists around on the forums who do free lance work.
Well in terms of coding, I’ve worked for about a year with C# coding in school and built various very simple things like tic tac toe, pong, different types of calculators, and a Galaga type game. My real difficulty here is trying to figure out the engine from scratch, I have no experience with game engines and I am not sure how to start really.
Go to Learn section and try making a Roll-a-Ball project. Based on your past C# experience, you’ll become familiar with Unity’s APIs in no time!
Apart from that, watching video tutorials will help you navigate through the editor.
Sounds like you want to implement ‘War’. Any engine can handle that, check out hearthstone and tabletop simulator - those are both unity. I suggest looking into those 2 games to see different styles of handling card games.
Specific advise, hmm… Are you making each card individually? You can do so. Are you going to make the art (if any) then generate numbers on the cards dynamically? You can do that also. I have more experience with the second option.
Make an image on the canvas, make it look how you want the card to look, then add text where you want the numbers to be. Then save a prefab of the card. This will let you instantiate cards and then you can access the text variable on the card and make it any random number or value you want.
I see you mentioned photoshop so… maybe make the card backgrounds there, then generate the numbers in unity?