I would like to make 1 more comment & say we all need to learn 
It’s whether we actually choose to do it mostly on our own or by other people’s effort that defines the speed that we learn knowledge.
Oh is it only BGE? Sorry, it said “Game engine support and discussion”, I assumed that meant ANY game engine…
Which part of “I continue to dip my toe in the pool of game engines” do you not understand?
Which programming languages you know and what kind of things you’ve built with those would be good things to know before telling you an engine to pick.
I am Aware of this 
I am somewhat insane, yes
I was talking about only FOSS ones, yes.
I’ve messed with some PERL waaaay back, and more recently some PHP for doing web backends…
I’ve never done anything game-engine-y…
Well, one can barely do text adventures with pure PHP so that’s not good at all.
If you just want to get acquainted with game development and leave it at that, BGE is a good place to start. It lacks some features, yes, but you can just pick it up and play with it some, no subscription, no dumb hub or launcher or platform, no nuthin; you slap scripts onto objects, run the game and stuff happens – unless you want to do complex things then it’s pretty straight forward. And you only need to learn some python which is pretty darn easy.
Armory3D is pretty cool as well and had fancy logic node stuff last I check, but it uses haxe which is basically java in disguise. A lot of people have a problem with that, but if you’re not one of them, then it’s worth a try. It also runs inside Blender like BGE, which is awesome.
Then there’s Godot. It’s not a bad engine, it’s just… Godot.
My advice, though? Code something wacky from scratch on C++, one can get something silly like flappy bird done in a reasonable amount of time. That’ll teach you more about games than any god forsaken engine out there, FOSS or not.
Thanks for all the advice, I have only a hazy idea about what “logic nodes” are,…but are they one of those things that lessens coding? i.e. if I use it, do I have to code less?
It’s visual programming, basically. You use blocks that listen for events, connect them to logical gates, have these gates alter an object’s state when positive.
Sounds Awesome! Thanx!
No worries
Your doing the right thing asking things (RandomPerson glares at everyone here)
If you hover over the #game-engine:game-engine-support-and-discussion it says -
For the blender game engine (& UPBGE I guess 
)
Next time you have questions about other game engines or software -
Create a thread here #support:other-software
Will do
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you are not insane, you are a beginner no different from everyone who starts game making (lets not use the word newbie). everyone who wants to make games starts trying to do an MMO, an rpg or some other extremely complex game. in my experience, you will start well and full of energy, but get tired in a matter of days or weeks, if you are lucky you will hold for more than a month, but then realize that you are still a long way from completing it and will end up abandoning it.
you have to first have a very clear idea of what you want to do, plan everything, and if it’s too much think of forming a team. but before that you need to be good at something, either coding, modeling or painting/drawing. a game is not made with just ideas, and you run out of them pretty fast. a good start would be to make simple games first and then scale and make bigger ones as you get better at it.
bge is just one of the FOSS engines, you can find more around the internet, some are specialized for a type of game (like id tech is better at FPS, others are made for rts, rpg, etc). bge, upbge, and others are multipurpose engines and it may take more effort to make a type of game you want.
i had messed with c a way back, that doesn’t mean i could code a game or use an engine. you need to learn a language to the point where you can make you own code and solve problems and know what everything does and how.
PHP is not a programing language and will get you nowhere, unless you plan on making a browser game like ogame.
python is the easiest language to learn, but it is slow if you want to make a game in pure python, it works the best for scripting inside of bge. engines made for a single type of game will be a bunch of c++ or c code that you have to modify and compile. and last i checked godot had its own language that is not worth learning because it doesn’t work outside of godot.
and then there’s unity which uses c#, they released an official linux editor. but it is not foss.
the worst part of PHP is the need for a server to store the game.
you can make “games” in bge with no scripts at all. the problem with it is not so much the lack of features as the bugs preventing a full game from being completed. you can make features like saving/loading, menues, or even physics using scripts, but then you need to load a scene or want a level with multiple lights, and you will run into a bug that will prevent you from continuing development and you will be forced to stop there. and the bugs may not be fixed, every few months a new fork starts, or development of an existing one like upbge stops, then starts again.
bad advice. you don’t code flappy birds on c++, you code it on c++ using opengl or sdl and need to learn a bunch of stuff like rendering and asset management. engines do these things so that you don’t have to and can focus on mechanics and higher level code.
coding on an engine will always be hard, the best is to start small and then learn more. vanilla bge is good to start practicing game making, so is upbge. if you want something serious you have to either move to a professional tool like unity, or know a lot of coding.
we have had this discussion a few months ago. the game engine forum is for ANY game engine, so long as the assets are made in blender or it has something to do with blender (like upbge). don’t ask these questions in software, ask them HERE, in the game engine forum.
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Ah THIS is very useful and Vital info! What I was Looking For! Thanks!
This “ogame” thing looks kind of fascinating actually - is this like Elite?
That’s heresy. Try having an armature with more than five or so animation states, the number of bricks you need to create a sequence can go through the roof pretty quick, whereas with python you can just have an actuator for each layer you need and manage them at runtime.
Or what if you have multiple objects and need to synchronize their actios? Maybe you want to swap one object’s mesh for a dozen potential other meshes depending on a bunch of variables, too many for plain property bricks to be manageable. Perhaps you want to vertex paint the area closer to a collision point, perhaps you want to have an inventory system that doesn’t drive you utterly insane.
I mean I get it, you can do a lot of things without scripts but there’s a point where it’s actually easier to code it. And a whole lot of other things you outright can’t do otherwise.
Aye, the struggle is the whole point. See how tough even basic crap can get and learn how to deal with it; the tools you gain from that process help you develop anything you want.
that’s the way 98% of bge games are made. i wish more people would use scripts, but that’s not the case.
ogame is a text based (with pictures!) browser massive multiplayer game that’s been played for almost 20 years. it is all controlled with hyperlinks and buttons and it changes values in a database. you press a button to build a building or ship, then it starts a counter for minutes or hours or days, then players take their “fleets” to “attack” other players and steal their minerals. it has no animations or explosions, some variations may have some cinematic, but all battles are calculated by an algorithm and sent as a message to the players after pressing a single button.
it is a rather slow and at times tedious game, they have made many games of the style for many different genres like fantasy. it is not a fast and easily gratifying game like super mario or call of duty, but it is a game, and i think can be made with php. but it would be the only type of game that can be made in that language.