You've washed ashore in a foreign land. With nothing to your name other than a few tools you’ll have to learn how to live off the land. Explore, grow crops, and...
Also, last word of advice, I promise. I could be completely wrong, but you remind me of me when I was younger and wanted to start making games. The first thing I wanted to make was an MMO like world of warcraft. You've likely seen this opinion all across the internet but its best to start small in terms of projects. A game like this seems like it would be simple on the surface, plant some crops, raise some animals, mine some rocks, etc. I can tell you from experience that it cascades into a huge undertaking. Of course, far be it from me to dash your dreams. I believe that if you are willing to work for it you can make whatever you want regardless of experience. Just understand that it may be a long and bumpy road. Regardless, good luck, and I'm sorry for writing a short story here.
Seriously thank you for proper answer, actualy i'm a 42 year old guy, and i was working as a graphic designer for video all my life and as a director and videografer right now, i love telling stories, and this is what drives me to try make a game. I know what i want and how i want it, i wanted a sepcyfic type of game to play with my wife, and cant find any so as classic ADHD behaviour i began to research how i can make it mysefl. Found tons of single peeson developers out ther with great stories, so i believed its doable. I have tons of experience with working long hours in tons and tons of 3d, video, and music programs, and some coding experience but i kind of hate line of codes, i wish i could work with images and logic, that is what i understand and can manage in my head. I created some tests in C3 and it worked great so i started to look if someone made anything similar so i did not dive in to it, for nothing.
And found your game with was sort of exactly what type i wish to make, somthing in the lines od Stardew Valley and so many clones of it, i ofcorse looked at Unity but it seem nothing is graphical there you just stare at lines of code whole day, i cant believe there is not a better way theese days with all the AIs, chatGpt and so on to make a game, i was sure right now is perfect moment in time and tech to do so. I think it will be easier and easier with time and new AIs out there. All i wanned to create somthing to play on Big TV, split screen, the way i imagined. Stardew looks amazing on a big screen but its not exactly what i wish i had. There is lots of games almost there. theres is one im looking forward Chef RPG i think its the name, and it kind of look what im looking for, but still, creating is what i do for almost 40 years and for me its naturat to try game dev.
So basicaly you had to create the game from scrath in another engine ? And was it Unity? Im also thinking it such an game would be possible in eg. Ureal, with i'm little familiar with video work. But it is also huge engine with so much stuf i dont really need i think.
I know what you mean in terms of wanting an engine that isn’t just staring at lines of code. It’s the same thing that drew me to Construct way back when. Unity is definitely not going to be your friend when it comes to visual coding. I can’t really think of any other engines that have visual coding built into them as a baseline. I think Game Maker has a visual version, but I’m not sure. Outside of that I think RPG Maker is more of a visual engine. Although I think if you want to do much in RPG Maker you’re forced to start doing scripting.
As for AI and ChatGPT and such, I’m not sure you’ll have much luck. AI can do some neat things, but I think its abilities are largely over-exaggerated. When it comes to code you can tell ChatGPT to write code for you, but to my knowledge it can’t get anywhere close to the complexity you would need for a whole game. I believe its better at automating little tasks within coding and even then I’m not sure I’d trust the code it writes.
Unreal would also be more than capable of running this sort of game however I think Unreal caters more to a higher fidelity of game. I’m not sure its made for pixel art and 2D but I’ve never looked into it. Maybe you don’t want to do pixel art though, so that may not matter. Regardless, Unreal Engine falls into the same sort of space as Unity I think where the engine is incredibly powerful, but there is a lot of bloat going on.
As for me I’m using Game Maker 2 to make the new version, and yeah, I had to start completely over. I still have all the sprite assets and stuff of course, but the code has to be entirely redone. That was part of the point though as, like I said, I made plenty of mistakes in the Construct version which I couldn’t fix because they were too buried in the code by the time I realized.
At the end of the day, honestly, no matter where you look on the internet you will find people debating engines and which one is good and which one sucks, etc. No matter what engine you pick there will be people who will tell you ‘That engine is terrible, you should never use it’.
My advice, ignore them. Pick the one you think works best for you, and work within it. If there was one thing I learned working C3 its that in almost all cases the issues I ran into were almost always ones of my own making and not the engine.
Also, as an additional note since you mentioned it. Multiplayer is one of the harder, if not hardest things to implement. If you want your game to be multiplayer you have to plan for that from the start. I suggest you approach everything in your game as if multiplayer was mandatory.
Also, because of how Construct works you can’t have players in a multiplayer session on different layouts. So, unless you want to limit all players to being in the same area of your farming game you have to make one big layout with all the individual rooms inside that layout. Then you break it up via artificial transition points in the world where the game can dynamically load and unload assets into the world because if everything was loaded at once it would have performance issues. I can say with certainty that this can be done because that’s how Verdant Village works.