by MiTT3NZ » Fri Jun 28, 2013 6:09 am
+1 on Unity. Plenty of great tutorials for it (seriously, it's a ridiculously high number), plenty of freebies in the asset store, plus Unity itself is free (you can go pro for £1.5k, but unless you want a black skin and want to write shaders, there's really no point)
RPG Maker's alright, but Ruby (the scripting language) is a pain in the arse to learn if you want to customise the mechanics. On the plus side though, it is very simple for turn-based battles, fetch quests, etc. and Google image results will provide you with plenty of free sprite sheets.
If you want to do 3D modelling, then 3DS Max is the best for it, imo. Cinema4D's good too, but you have to pay for either one of them. Blender on the other hand's free, so you might wanna look there.
Texture-wise, Photoshop or Gimp. MS Paint (XP version, not that shitty update they came out with for Vista & 7) is brilliant for creating your own sprites.
I've also found using Google street view's excellent for recreating certain real-life places. For example, if you just want to create a very low-poly version of your city, you can start off by just making box 3D models, screen capturing the building on street view, then use stretch/skew/perspective in Photoshop til it looks just right.
Either way, as a hobby, it's much easier to get into than you may realise. If you want to release it commercially though, I'd advise talking to people in the relevant communities, such as Unity, IndieDB/ModDB, RPGMXP(some other letter or two here, I can't remember what the place was called anymore), or just have a PM chat with Segata, the guy's got some good advice.
But yeah, plenty of resources on the internet, but don't make the same mistake as 99% of us make by trying to jump straight into it. Just play around with each program to familiarise yourself with everything, then download some demo projects to play about with, then you can look into tutorials n shit. Otherwise you'll probably just turn yourself off the idea.
MiTT3NZ has received a thanks from: Thief