I want to surprise my boyfriend by making a quest game for his birthday. I know nothing about coding and need guidance where to start, I have a month!

1

Twine

I would recommend creating a text based adventure game like zork with twine. Twine is a free and open-source tool created by Chris Klimas for making interactive fiction in the form of web pages. It is available on Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux. I have used it in game design workshops before. Https://twinery.org.

#Visual Novel Engine #IDE #Game Development 275 social mentions

2

Scratch

The first, and most obvious pick would be something like Scratch. Scratch is intended as an educational tool for learning programming where you use code blocks to construct the logic of your game, so it's very easy to read and understand. It's certainly more limited than something like UE or Unity, but assuming I understand your goal it shouldn't be too difficult to put it together.

#Kids Education #Programming #Coding 557 social mentions

3

RenPy

Finally, probably the 'easiest' option... Ren'Py. It's an engine you use to make visual novels. It was used to make games like Doki Doki Literature Club, so it allows for more flexibility than basic 'click for 9 hours' gameplay. It /also/ now supports Python, an 'actual' programming language, but it has its own relatively simple scripting language that you can use to put something together. It even has pretty easy methods for jumping from point to point in your script, so I could see it not being /too/ difficult to create a point and click adventure-style traversal system inside of it.

#Visual Novel Engine #IDE #Text Editors 16 social mentions