Tommy Stubblefield, a level 4 monster with 4 posts — 1 year ago:

I’m so full of game ideas that sometimes they somersault out of my ears at inopportune times.

The conundrum for me is that I’m a creative person to the bone, and don’t have much coding aptitude beyond HTML and CSS. What tools are out there to help me — and the rest of the Programmatically Challenged — bring these ideas to life, whether in app form, browser game, ARG, etc.?

(Sorry if this is the wrong place for this post.)

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Sharon R. Hoosein, a level 2 monster with 5 posts — 1 year ago:

Pencil and paper: Great games don’t necessarily require great technology. Without the coding overhead, you can start refining your design skills immediately through board, card and pen-paper games (think D&D). You’ll learn to consider those various annoying details (stat tweaking, incentive/dissuasive placement, pacing, etc) that aren’t really that fun to think about but are essential to making your game fun to play.

GameMaker: http://www.yoyogames.com/make
Coming soon to Android, I believe

RPGMaker: http://www.rpgmakerweb.com/#axzz1Klly2uoh
Relatively a ton of flexibility for a program with such a small learning curve

Processing: http://www.processing.org/
This is actually programming. However it’s very easy to learn after you’ve taken a basic programming class for the basics on loops, conditionals, and OOP

You can even use your HTML and CSS skills to make an ARG or point and click adventure games. Have the players start at one webpage, and they progress through the game by clicking links that lead to other webpages.

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BenGold, a level 2 monster with 2 posts — 1 year ago:

In addition to what Sharon said, I’d recommend Multimedia Fusion http://www.clickteam.com/website/usa/multimedia-fusion-2.html It’s what I grew up on, so it might be a bit old by now!

Lastly, I think it’s worth pointing this out — Programming is not scary! It doesn’t even have to be hard! All of the above tools actually require some form of programming, although it may not look like code. Programming is simply spelling out in very clear, unambiguous terms exactly what your game is. Learning to program would be the best investment for your creativity you could make. Nothing is more liberating than feeling like you can bring any old idea you have to life.

I’d start with very high-level languages so that you’re not dealing with any hardware nitty-gritty. Try XNA Game Studio (http://create.msdn.com/en-US/resources/downloads), which uses the beginner-friendly C# language. If you’re anti-Microsoft, try PyGame (www.pygame.org) or the new toolkit, Love (www.love2d.org).

Good luck! The journey of Programming awesomeness starts with one step.

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QuantumChaos, a level 7 monster with 30 posts — 1 year ago:

i have to agree with Sharon,pencil and paper is absolutely the fastest way to get a game idea to a physical working model.I’m very art oriented and making game pieces, boards, cards etc is child’s play. i spend more time getting it to work as a board,card,or physical real world game than i do getting the product looking good which is great because any good game works weather its 2 cards battling it out or 2 fully 3d monsters ripping at each others health points. the core concepts of the games is what drives the playability and re playability. and once you have a tweaked out game in front of you transitioning it to a video game shouldn’t be nearly as hard than starting it from code or a game kit system.

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Ben Reynolds, a level 1 monster with 2 posts — 1 month ago:

Stencyl might be useful for you: http://www.stencyl.com/

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Game Development

What game-making tools are helpful to us non-Programmers? (5 posts)