In your own opinion, what would be simple to difficult to make? Here are the types of games as follows;
- Racing Game
- Top Down Shooter
- 2D Platformer
- 3D Platformer
- Color Matching Puzzle Game (Such as Puyo Puyo or Columns)
- RPG
- FPS
- Fighting Game
Classifying difficulty by genre is less accurate than classifying it by features you want. A racing game is very easy to create if you’re creating a local-only multiplayer, but the difficulty will increase rapidly as you add features like computer-controlled cars and network-based multiplayer.
The Asset Store can massively impact the difficulty too with kits that offer anything from a basic framework to a complete package ready to ship as soon as you’ve bought it.
My recommendation, since you appear to be looking for a genre to start with, is to make a list of the features you want for each genre, and then look on the store for kits that can assist you with these features. Just as an example UFPS: Ultimate FPS can support multiplayer and AI with additional third party assets (Behaviour Designer and Playmaker).
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Depends entirely on how complex you want to make the project.
For example, the FPS genre is dominated by multi million dollar games, but you could build a terrible but functional FPS just by picking up UFPS off the store and spending an afternoon playing with it (terrible as in a good FPS game requires more time and effort to create than that, not that UFPS is terrible, but even a terrible FPS game is still an FPS game).
At the same time, you could easily spend months working on a simple puzzle game.
What you really need to focus on is what are your strengths vs weaknesses, and what will the scope of your game be. A game will be a lot simpler for you to create if the game plays into your strengths as a developer.
I guess you’re right. I’ve been trying so hard to make a puzzle game like columns with a puyo puyo match mechanic, but haven’t been able to figure it out. I have been doing good on the art and stuff, but I have been getting some trouble with it. Perhaps I should start small, and make something simple like a small dungeon crawler map. Sound good?
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friend and I have been making a 3d board game. I just do the art so not like i really know whats going on, but even this is a pretty complex project. The complexity comes in making it look and feel good. The bare mechanics are simple enough. I think its good to start like this : make a game thats simple enough you can practically hold the entire design in your head, then slowly increase complexity by working on the looks and feels till you hit professional quality.
so, for example, make any of the unity tutorial games, then just keep reworking it, adding and subtracting till its like a professionally made game.
Just my two cents
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Where are you running into issues?
You say the art is ok, so is it the programming you’re having issues with? Programming is more about problem solving than it is about writing code, and puzzle games usually provide nice little modular problems to solve, so I’d recommend getting help with that rather than ditching the project and just running into a different issue. This will probably happen for any project.
Is the issue that you can’t reliably get the matching/popping to work, or something else?
I’d say the fighting game, because you would need a lot of character models, all of them rigged and animated. You would also need to make a lot of fighting animations, which would be kinda difficult. The second hardest, I think, is the racing game, because you need to build a huge map for it.
Racing game can be as well 2D. Which reduces potential complexity.
Fighting games can use also 2D animations. Again don’t have to be 3D.
Then you can make just effects, so no need for rigging characters.
@JacboyX
Not sure if purposely (for picked interest) or, simply forgot / don’t know, but there are other game types as well:
RTS, MMO, Building, Management (Tycoon alike), Flight, and probably more …
Then of course mix of any of them, in between.
Just want to throw out there, you don’t need rigging and animation to make a 3d game. You could start by making a variation of chess. You only need a few static 3d figurines and bare-bones programmer animation to make them slide from one square to the other.
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Yeah sure, just offload all the animation to the poor overworked programmer 
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I’d put this in basically the following order:
- Puzzle
- Racing
- 2d platformer
- top down shooter
- 3d platformer
- fighting game
- fps
- rpg
I agree with everyone’s “it depends” answer, but basically thats a list sorting by how much content you need to make for each genre. The amount of content usually correlates to how hard it is to make.
Of course, not all examples are equal and different games in practice will come down at different points. For example, you can have a puzzle game with more content than a simple rpg. But those are kinda rough guidelines.
Generally people would agree that RPGs are the heaviest content. FPS probably has the biggest range, with massive set piece call of duty style games being unbelievably massive undertakings, but basic arena style shooters having only minimal content requirements. Fighting games may not have huge amounts of content, but the attention to detail needed in the content is very high.
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Outputting the content is time intensive, but I think the danger with high amount of content is when change happens. For instance, I make some game balance tweaks in level 10, that necessitates dialogue changes in mission 2, which necessitates a change in mission 5, which necessitates a change in… well, you get the idea. It all ties together, so the more pieces you got the more change hurts.
Thats why you should make your first games with cubes. Isolate the variables, just focus on one thing at a time. First you get the basic mechanics in place. Then you iterate on overall design. Then when you are 99% sure any changes will be minor, you put the time into content and polish.
2D games are actually considerably more difficult than 3D games with it comes to a fighting game animation pipeline.
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Is that true? Maintaining accurate hitboxing and frame count stuff for 3d would be a nightmare i’d think.
Really high quality in 2d or 3d would be a ton of work either way. Fighting games have such strict detail.
Do you mean for example, case like kick and syncing with hit script?
https://www.indiedb.com/news/the-fist-foot-way
The difficulty comes in that hitbox alignment in 3D is marginally less complicated when you have to deal with things like updating position based on new timings, but the really big issue is that it is extremely rare to get 2D animation right on the first go, and updating that can be a lot more time consuming than doing so in 3D.
This is actually a fairly large part of why fighting games over a decade and a half ago shifted to 3D in near the blink of an eye.
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because 2d animations have to be drawn each time? versus moving a joint a scooch and then reexporting?
Heck yeah to this.
In my current project we’ve deliberately avoided making a lot of content while we develop features and iterate on the game’s core design. Every time we make a significant change to either of those we have to rejig content, so we basically wanted to make sure we kept rework related to those changes to a minimum until (most of) those changes are behind us.
So we’ve re-built a small amount of content a bunch of times as we’ve developed features and playtested, and only recently started scaling out and building further content for the game.
Yeah, me and Frosted just had a “lessons learned” discussion about that. Going forward with future projects, the plan is to basically iterate on the game sans content – in other words, grayboxing – until we are reasonably certain no major changes will occur.
Plan will go to shit, of course, but it will save a bit of trouble. 