Gamedev Lounge 0010

[Hoeloe]

I've been writing down my ideas for a game for years.
Planning on making it one day, how difficult would it be to program a game that is about as complete as 2D zelda games ie Minish Cap?

Game Maker: Studio. It's perfect for something like this, and it'd make a great Android/iOS game.

Not for something of that scale, I fear. Something of that size is best not undertaken alone. To create something the size of the Minish Cap, you would be best using a programming language, rather than a game making tool. The reason for this is that with a larger number of resources, and a larger amount of data being processed, it is much in your favour to have greater control over how those resources are being used. For example, you don't want every graphic in the entire game loaded at once - it will use up all your memory space, so you want to find an efficient way of deciding when to load it. To do this, and reduce load times, is difficult. It is possible to do without load times with great care and multi-threading techniques, but I do not believe this is possible in most game creation tools.

That is just one example. The larger your project gets, the more likely it is to fail, and so the more control you have over the system, the better.