What kind of game are you looking to make?

rat_queen said:
what free beginner engine should I use?

There's several good ones out there. Just pick one. You could also try making one simple game with each and see what you like best. I haven't tried all of the following, so I'm mostly writing what I've seen other people say about them. Some engines you could try are:

• Gamemaker: mostly for 2D games. Might be the easiest to use if the game you want to make is simple. But if you're trying to make something more complex, some of the others might work better for that.
• RPGMaker: Easy for making JRPGS (I think it's 2D-only, but I'm not sure), hard to make other types of games on.
• RenPy: For visual novels. Games that show images and text to tell a story, and give the player some menus to make decisions that have consequences in the story. Hard to use for other types of games (especially action games).
• Unity: General purpose, can do both 2D and 3D. Not too focused on one type of game, but popular genres (platformers and shooters) might be the easiest ones, as there's plenty of tutorials on how to make those in that engine (it's very popular).
• Godot: Also general purpose: I'm guessing Unity has slightly better 3D, but Godot is easier to use for things like making menus.
• Unreal Engine: Probably a bit more 3D-focused. It's used by quite a few games that look great, but I'm not sure how beginner-friendly it is.

As for myself, I speak English, Danish and Spanish well enough that I've tried to make a game playable in all three, with a language selection menu. At the time I made that decision, only Godot had reasonably good documentation on how to do that (excluding documentation unusable by people with some disabilities), so I chose Godot, and except for having to use a script to get scrollable text to show correctly, it seemed to be pretty easy… I did have some programming experience in Python first though. But Unity added some tools for that at about the same time as I was making the game, which I haven't looked closely at.

rat_queen said:
What type of game, and how should I start?

Start with something simple, then make something a bit more complex. You don't need to make all of the following (and you can probably make something not on the list too, but probably start with something simple), but they're roughly sorted so that easy games to make are first:

• a pong clone,
• a top-down game where you walk on a map and have to pick up some things and maybe avoid some other things (and there might be “walls” you can't go through so you have to walk around them, and if you manage to get all of that working, you could probably add doors that open when the player does something, but at that point it's probably more complex than a 2D platformer),
• a short visual novel,
• a 2D platformer,
• a top-down shooter,
• a simple card game (for any amount of players, but probably all taking turns on the same computer, network multiplayer is hard, even if this particular type of game is probably far from the hardest to get it working for)
• a point-and-click game (think adventure or hidden-object game)
• a 3D collecting game (like the top-down game described above),
• a top-down racing game,
• a 3D first-person shooter,
• a 3D racing game (start with two players on the same computer, then maybe make an AI enemy, this type of game might be hard to make network multiplayer work for),
• a 2D fighting game (same comment as above),
• a 2D RPG,
• a turn-based strategy game (if you're going to make networked multiplayer, it's probably easier to make for a turn-based game like this rather than something faster-paced, but do try to code local multiplayer first anyway)

So yeah, you should probably start with something 2D, and if you want to make something complex, find some simple part you can make and test before you make the other parts.

If you make several games, you could choose for each one some skill you want to get better at. For example, “while making this game, I want to get better at pixel art” or “this time I want to have fun making sound effects”.

rat_queen said:
and I have a stable job so I don't make money from these games help!!

It would probably take a while before you've made some game that people would want to pay for. So having a stable job in the meantime is probably a good thing.

rat_queen said:
oh and my computer is laggy and crap so yea

Probably best to stick to 2D at first then. And if you use Godot, use the GLES2 setting and not GLES3 (it asks which one to use when creating a project, and for 2D games, you can't use most of the GLES3 effects anyway. Even when making 3D games, you can make good-looking games without GLES3, and you could start with GLES2 and switch to GLES3 at any time if you really want to).

And consider learning a bit about art and music too. They can have an impact on how fun a game is to play. And if you're getting someone else to make those parts of the games, it's still nice to have a clue what they can do, and to know how to explain to them what you need them to do.