Great game idea, brand new coder.

Feel free to ask - but no one can help here without knowing mainly:

What specific problems have you encountered?

I am learning unity 6 and C#. Can I help? Can you tell me a little about your game idea?

Write a design document. Sketch out some scenes and make some concept art. Describe the mechanics and overall structure, and the mood / gameplay feeling you want to achieve. Describe what aspects of the game are appealing to the player for what reason. Define the target audience and what personality or preferences you are targeting.

You won't be able to make anything great until you got quite a bit of experience. It's an unrewarding and dry journey, but with how terrible the job market is, getting into programming at 15 is a good choice. If you only start learning at 18 or 20 or something, you probably won't find a job as things are currently.

Keep the project on the backburner until you are good enough to work on it. Even if you never finish it, it would still be valuable as a portfolio entry for when you need to find a job one day. And in the meantime, work on small things first, and push your limits.

Also a useful experience is to think the idea through in terms of effort and steps you need to take to build it. That should also tell you how realistic the idea is in the first place. Also, no offense, but probably the idea is not great if you're only starting out. Look up on youtube “why my dream game failed” or similar videos. Most beginners have no sense of taste as a designer, and so they come up with crap that they sink years into, and only after years they burn out and become able to see it for what it really is: an incoherent mess without a clear direction or appeal. I might be wrong, though, and the idea might truly be great. Anyway if you don't plan to build it yourself, feel free to share it, maybe you'll get some feedback on it.

NolanLangley2 wrote:

I don’t have the time on my hands to put the plan into motion as I am only 15

Oh boy. Seems you have MUCH more time than those you ask for help. :D

JoeJ wrote:

Oh boy. Seems you have MUCH more time than those you ask for help. :D

Should we lie to him?

"Boy, you have no time now ... just wait until you grow up ... plenty of time, always holidays, you're absolutely never stuck in 70+ hrs. per week at work, or more ... especially when you start a business!"

Well, you can still do without doing sports, other hobbies, and founding a family to fulfill your dev dreams. \:D/
Or, maybe even better, there is no more distraction from jobs and businesses in the future, because AI is doing it all for us and we have plenty of time to enter prompts giving our dream game. \\:D//
Or, best of all, we end up in the matrix anyway, and making a game inside the game is easier than making a game IRL (which, according to top scientists, is no real world but a simulation already now.) ?:

NolanLangley2 wrote:

No matter what i do I just keep thinking of how great the game could be if made by the right people.

Sounds YOU are the right people, because only you have the vision and motivation about your game. The other people have their own ideas, but they may join when you have something to show.

If you really want it, just learn programming, game engines, or whatever is needed.
If you don't want to work on building up those skills, then you simply don't want it bad enough and you better think about something else.

Well, you can still do without doing sports, other hobbies, and founding a family to fulfill your dev dreams. \:D/
Or, maybe even better, there is no more distraction from jobs and businesses in the future, because AI is doing it all for us and we have plenty of time to enter prompts giving our dream game. \\:D//
Or, best of all, we end up in the matrix anyway, and making a game inside the game is easier than making a game IRL (which, according to top scientists, is no real world but a simulation already now.) ?:

NolanLangley2 wrote:

No matter what i do I just keep thinking of how great the game could be if made by the right people.

Sounds YOU are the right people, because only you have the vision and motivation about your game. The other people have their own ideas, but they may join when you have something to show.

If you really want it, just learn programming, game engines, or whatever is needed.
If you don't want to work on building up those skills, then you simply don't want it bad enough and you better think about something else.

JoeJ wrote:

Well, you can still do without doing sports, other hobbies, and founding a family to fulfill your dev dreams. \:D/

Hehe ... looks at my family, looks at what we do all the time ... yeah, I'm either not sleeping or not finishing my hobby projects. You guessed right, sleeping is obviously overrated.

JoeJ wrote:

Or, maybe even better, there is no more distraction from jobs and businesses in the future, because AI is doing it all for us and we have plenty of time to enter prompts giving our dream game. \\:D//

So far it looks like we're going to spend even more time debugging bs and hidden bugs created by LLMs. For some reason (I wonder which one... right?!) none of the senior devs want to bother with tons of LLM generated code. Recently I got a friend complaining he was given 10k LOC change done in 2 days or so, and author of PR did not understand a single thing Claude did there.

It also didn't even work in test environment.

He was very polite and explained why he can't MR such things.

When we talked, I said that I'd go full Gordon Ramsey on him:

Vilem Otte said:
So far it looks like we're going to spend even more time debugging bs and hidden bugs created by LLMs. For some reason (I wonder which one... right?!) none of the senior devs want to bother with tons of LLM generated code. Recently I got a friend complaining he was given 10k LOC change done in 2 days or so, and author of PR did not understand a single thing Claude did there.

Wait for the debugging models to come out. It's going to be great.

RmbRT wrote:

Wait for the debugging models to come out. It's going to be great.

LLMs for debugging ... giving you the most probable next token for debugging in given context window.

Yeah, this sounds stupid enough for some ChatGPT wrapper to become valuated at $1B before it crashes into no value at all.

NolanLangley2 wrote:

I have a game idea that i think is great, but i just think it is going to be too hard for me because I’m brand new to coding and can’t even do art.

For some reason, nobody mentioned modding, perhaps because they were too distracted by their own "old person" issues. I say that as an old fart myself. But frankly for the most part, over the course of my life so far... I've gotten the most done by modding an existing game. Not so much my own games from scratch. And I do have a strong enough technical background, and art background. That actually might be the trouble...

It was different back in the days of the Atari 800, where the computers were really really simple, compared to today's. An 11 year old kid could learn pretty much everything there was to know about the machine, with just a few books and a magazine subscription. Half the games were shipped in BASIC and you could just read the code for them. You'd get a book telling you what memory locations did what, like what would change a color on the screen, or what would make a sound at some pitch. You'd put numbers in them. That's it.

It was very hands on. It wasn't buried in loads of crap like it is now. I actually did get some trivial games done, when I was your age, or a bit younger. It was quite doable. People who managed more than I did, also managed to get some pretty good money doing simple games, because there wasn't a lot of competition. I remember something called Sneakers, a shoot-em up that merely looked cool. Hm, never realized there was an Apple II version. Or maybe I did but I forgot.

Anyways, that was then, this is now. In the present day, it's a lot easier to work with an existing game that actually works, and change it around to make it "better". Can you do something like your idea that way? Doesn't have to be exact. You might at least arrive at some kind of proof of concept. Especially, to determine if the idea really is as good as you think, if you actually play something like it.

Also... is there any game that already did something like what you have in mind? Have you checked? Anything even close? Same genre at least, or do you think you have somehow invented a new genre? Unlikely but... not impossible or totally unheard of.

The other posters are right about one thing though. To do your idea, you're gonna have to do it. Everyone else has got their own ideas they're working on. Doing things solo, means scaling them down to what you personally can accomplish right now. That's why I mentioned old Atari games, because they're so trivial compared to what people do today. They are often still perfectly good games though. I mentioned modding because it's several orders of magnitudes easier to do that solo.

BTW, nuthin' wrong with sports practice. At your age, my passions were math, art, and karate. I was pretty darned good at all 3. Well I wish I had been a bit better at karate, that's another story. The point is, I'm still all 3 of these things now. You can do more than one thing well. If you happen to ever learn about Oscar Wilde, for instance, apparently he was a pretty good boxer.