I’m trying to make a pocket pet game, like the evolution of all the little calculator screened toys in the 90’s and 00’s. I don’t want it to be the whale hunting, spyware riddled garbage that most phone games are. I’d rather like to release it on F-Droid instead of Google if I release it at all. I have all of it worked out on paper, from the random tables to the creature stats, to the combat mechanics, you can play it as a pen and paper if you wanted to. Problem is, I’m a pen and paper guy, and I’m having an awful time trying to learn anything about code. Where do I go to get help with this?
I would encourage you to try to learn gaem development, it’s fun :D I’ve personally tried Unity and Godot and prefer the latter bc it’s oepn-source and I like the workflow but both are good.
Brackeys makes the best Unity tutorials and he’s starting to make some pretty good Godot ones too. My first games were pretty much following along the Brackeys tutorials and then trying to extend the game by adding more levels, gimmicks, etc. and learning a bunch of new things along the way. Some more Godot specific tutorials I like are GDQuest and HeartBeast.
Good luck on your game development journey! :D
If you want to open source it you can already open source your documents.
You can publish them and see if others like the idea and join you.
Maybe create a lemmy community to organize people who want to join.
When you hear “I’ve got this great app idea—it just needs someone to code it,” it may sound to you like you’re halfway there. But from a programmer’s point of view, that’s actually the least interesting and riskiest way to start. Here’s why:
1. There’s no roadmap—just “code this”
- Undefined scope: If all I have is a vague idea, I don’t know what “done” even looks like. Am I building a basic prototype? A polished product? What features must it have on day one, and what can wait until later?
- Endless scope creep: Without clear boundaries, every conversation becomes “Just one more little thing,” and suddenly what was supposed to be a weekend project balloons into months (or years).
2. You’re asking me to invent half the project
- UI/UX design: How should it look and feel? What screens go where? How do users navigate? That’s a specialized discipline all its own.
- Product strategy: Who exactly is this for? Why will they use it? How will you reach those users? If you can’t answer that, I can’t write code that solves a real problem.
- Testing & polish: Code needs testing, bug-fixing, documentation, deployment, maintenance… none of which you’ve accounted for.
3. No incentives, no commitment
- Why me? Great programmers want to work on problems they find meaningful, challenging, or fun—and ideally get compensated for their time. “Just code my idea” won’t light anyone’s fire.
- Who owns it? If I invest weekends or nights building your vision, what do I get? Equity? Pay? Recognition? Without a clear agreement, it’s a recipe for frustration and resentment.
- Long-term support: Apps need updates, server maintenance, user support. If you haven’t thought through who handles that, you’re building technical debt.
4. Real success stories are team sports
- Cross-functional collaboration: The best apps come from teams that include product thinkers, designers, data analysts, marketers—and yes, developers. You can’t outsource half the work and expect a hit.
- Iterate and learn: You start with sketches or clickable wireframes, show them to real people, iterate, then bring in developers to build a minimum viable product. That way, you’re coding something people actually want.
What you can do instead
- Write a one-page spec: Describe the core problem, your ideal user, key features, and success metrics.
- Mock it up: Even hand-drawn sketches of each screen help communicate your vision.
- Validate your idea: Talk to potential users. If they’re excited, you’ve got something to build.
- Find a partner: A developer who’s excited by your clear plan—and who sees a fair path to reward for their effort.
In short: coding is only about 20% of what it takes to launch a successful app. If you can’t show a programmer that you’ve thought through the other 80%, they’ll politely pass—because turning a half-baked idea into a working product is a lot more work (and risk) than it looks.
This response is sort of the issue I keep running into. I’ve already gotten this talk, learned from it, and moved forward. I now have nearly two notebooks detailing every mechanic, mock ups of ui design, animation ideas, sprites, complex dice roll mechanics to engage with tables for content generation, and even a roadmap for the first 15 major updates to assess timeline based on the time it takes to convert to a digital format. I’m not even looking to offload the work, database entries are like 90% of this.
I’m here asking because I don’t know how to do the next part where I find the other 20% of making this happen.
Some constructive criticism? This is info you should have put in OP, it would likely have made the thread more productive.
I got another suggestion, use the game development design to start. This will get all of the foundations of the games design that you just need to implement.
Edit: GDD(Game Design Document) search what it is and what’s the purpose and it will help the most.
I have even bigger aversions to anyone coming with “I have this fully specced Game Design Document”
Why? It’s literally proving that you did the 80%?
“Waterfall process” is a curseword in software development for a reason.
To me it proves the person is thinks that a game can be created without prototyping and iteration. In addition to only doing 10% of the work, they are under the illusion that they have done 80% and completing it is just a rote exercise. They have also overdesigned untested features and mechanics which makes any iteration harder. I’d have to break their thing down and iterate over the parts with them while also explaining this to them.
It’s just double worst.
To be fair tho this is what happens when you get involved with passionate but ignorant people? Where else would people go to get help if you just shut them down? This seems like gatekeeping but maybe there needs to be more context to game development in general? This is about someone who has an idea but no knowledge about implementation.
Where do I go
You go to a bank, because you need money to pay your programmer.
When you say you’re having an awful time; which part are you struggling with?
I’m learning Game Maker rn, would be willing to try to figure out how to implement some of the features as a co-learning thing, if you’re interested in some random dipshit
The real question is how organized your design doc(s) is/are, honestly, you could probably make whatever you’re thinking about in RPG maker if you weren’t afraid of it being generic AF so long as the organization is solid
Code isn’t that hard to learn, it just looks intimidating trust me.
Gamemaker and unity are free. Anyone can make a game.
Just make it on your own.
You’re absolutely right about the intimidation.
Is there maybe a guide or something that’s more a guide book on common things and less “learn this whole foreign language from scratch”?
No. There is no way to learn programming without a programming language. That’s like trying to learn art without using any form of artistic expression. I’m not an artist or nowhere near it but I believe it’s an appropriate analogy.
Just like art, you start by doing something, say drawing with a pencil. It is incredibly hard since you have to learn both how a pencil works and how to do art at the same time.
Once you have practiced, you know how a pencil works, and must’ve learned something about how to do art.
Now you take colored pencils and try to do art. It is difficult because you never did anything with color, but it’s easier than the pencil because you now have knowledge about art that you didn’t have before starting.
Programming is the same. Usually you start with either a single programming language and try to acquire the basic knowledge about programming. And then you learn other languages, which takes a fraction of the time it took to learn the first one. Since programming concepts are very similar across most programming languages.
Going back to your original question, assuming you want someone else to do the programming:
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It will not be cheap. So follow this route if you’re either willing to lose money, or willing to earn money with this app.
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Once you have the money, you find programmers like any other company. Post job openings and wait until you have applicants.
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You will not only need programmers. You will most likely also need art. Games are not a number-crunching program. They are art forms. If you want people to play your game, it must have artistic value. Without art, a videogame is no much different than an spreadsheet. You might find someone that both programs and does the art, but then probably it’s going to be expensive or won’t be of high quality.
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The game is not fully designed yet. Maybe the gameplay is, but there’s a lot of design that needs doing on the software side.
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I’m a software engineer. Not a business man nor a project manager. There’s probably many other big things I’ve missed.
If instead you want to program it yourself, I have some advice.
First of all, you should probably aim for a platform. Is it mobile or PC? If mobile, both IOS and android? Or only one of them? If PC, Linux, Windows or Mac? Your path will probably vary wildly depending on that.
Being a good programmer takes years, but I’m going to assume you don’t want that. You just want to learn it for this project. Well, it’s still probably going to take years, just less of them.
Whatever you choose in those questions. The starting point is the same. You gotta learn the basics. For that, unless you are developing from a Linux computer (and are somewhat experienced doing so), I would recommend you start with a language that is easy to set up and install. For that I would recommend either python, java. Another language I love and is easy to set up is rust, but it’s not beginner friendly at all.
Python is a very beginner friendly language. There’s thousands of free learning courses online. And installing it is very easy. If on windows, the installer has a checkbox like “add to the PATH”, just make sure to check that, even if you don’t know what it is. After that, it’s as easy as making a file with a name ending in “.py” and you can just run the program with “python mygame.py”. Python is also a great tool for everyday life automating things related to computers.
Java is less beginner friendly than python, but it has a very important feature called “static typing”. Static typing is very unergonomic and rigid when you are writing, but it prevents many mistakes that are very frustrating to fix. It also has many learning resources since it’s a very popular language. However most resources are older than python’s since java is way less popular than it used to be. Setting up your first java program is a bit trickier than python, but it’s not too hard.
Once you choose the starting language (you can also try both! Or switch mid-learning if you don’t like your initial choice), you have to do some simpler projects than the one you want to do. There’s plenty of beginner project ideas online.
Usually you start by implementing simple little usefull functions. For example string comparison. That is, having 2 strings of text: “mytext1” and “mytext2” you want to make a function that tells you if those are the same. Usually people reimplement functions from the standard library.
After that, you learn making a data structure. For example a list. So that you start with an empty list “[]” and you add numbers to it: [0], [0, 1].
Then you learn how classes work. How methods work. How global variables work.
Once you have basic knowledge of that, you do one of those beginner projects.
Then you learn how to use (and install) libraries.
Then you probably will want to learn how threads, and mutexes work.
Once you feel somewhat confident, you should try implementing your game on PC, without graphics, just the command line.
After that. You move on to your selected platform (iOS, android, PC). You probably will want to use a game engine. That comes with an entirely new and different learning curve. I haven’t used any of those so I can’t help you with that.
That game engine probably comes with its own programming language. Repeat the steps above with that new language until you feel confident.
Then you will probably start with your project.
You are still learning though. You will probably learn a lot with that project. So your work quality will probably be much larger at the end than at the start. You will probably be frustrated that the shit code you wrote at the start is hindering your progress. Don’t be afraid to start over the project from scratch again. It’s not from scratch. While doing it you probably developed a better design in your head, having that design will make writing the code the 2nd time much faster than the first time.
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There are tutorials that have you build a game to learn the basics and syntax and stuff. Oh, right, if you actually do use GameMaker avoid that drag&drop layout at all costs lol it’s not “easier”
But if you have it all written out already, now you just need to read the manual on whatever development platform you chose and figure out how to make the computer do what you have written. Like, if you want the title screen to have scrolling clouds and a bouncing logo for example, you’ll need to find out how to change the logo sprite’s Y coordinate and the clouds’ X coordinate using the documentation.
Tldr do one of those “my first game” tutorials on whatever platform you chose to get the feel of it.
No. Learning anything is hard. It is important to accept this. There is no special explanation or trick that gives a shortcut to learning.
When people say “learning to code isn’t hard” they are also correct, but they are speaking relatively. Learning to code isn’t hard as learning things go. Compared to playing piano, guitar, doing skateboard tricks, juggling, etc… it’s just practice and focus and reading and watching and practice and time.
cant you use chatgpt?
You can use it to learn or to code most of it. …if coding was all that it took
Three things based on other comments here:
(1) <name of game engine> is free, try that!
Be wary with this. They may be free for students or small deployment situations, but may have increasingly agressive demands as your user base increases in size or your seek some kind of profitability. I wouldn’t panic about, but do make sure to carefully review the licensing terms for ALL tools that you use in your process.
(2) Learning/Tutorials
Depends a bit on how you learn best. Youtube almost always has some good instructional videos. Most of the major tool/engine makers have large libraries of tutorials to draw from as well. Even very experienced programmers routinely have dozens of browser tabs that start from web searches that read “<name of my game engine/platform> how to do <specific thing I want to do>”.
(3) If you look to hire or contract out some of the work, just realize that you will very often only get what you really pay for. Quality work costs more. One option you have is to spend the next year or three doing everything you can yourself. Get as close to complete as you can. Then go to something like Kickstarter and look for completion funds. “Look at how complete the game is. If I can just get a little bit of money, I can hire a professional <whatever> to do that one part that I couldn’t do myself”. This is especially usual for getting access to skills like art, music, voice acting, etc.
You could try hiring someone on Fiverr. There are plenty of freelancers looking to take on work, and they should give you some level of customer service, and set your expectations for what actually needs to be done.
This might seem crazy but maybe try an AI editor like Cursor, Cline or Windsurt.
Even the free versions of Gemini, ChatGPT, Grok and DeepSeek aren’t bad.
Just tell them what you want, attach any drawings you have and make it a web app first.
This may be the easiest option. I’m not against ai for personal use, I’m just worried I may if I do release it people will judge negatively on that.
I would instantly distrust and never go near your app. I am a software engineer with more than two decades of IT experience.
Exactly, and for all we know this could be your dream app as well and you’ll never experience it because my wacky brain can’t seen to retain anything that can’t be copy/paste into a text doc.
because my wacky brain can’t seen to retain anything that can’t be copy/paste into a text doc.
That is not what I said. Vibe coding and using AIs tends to have security issues and not produce the best code.
If you want a professional developer to work on it, you need to put your sales hat on and sell them on the idea (or come up with enough cash to pay outright for someone to do it). It sounds like, based on your response to another poster, you do have a lot of the mechanics, UI/UX design, etc. so you should have a good point from which to pitch.
That’s what he’s trying to do, just doesn’t know where to go for that.
Now that I’m thinking about it I’m surprised there isn’t a dragons den type thing for software development.
Yes. I don’t know where to go either. I was purely giving my opinion on the ai vibe-coding thing.
