Robot Face

Um last minute question unrelated to cohost going read only but is there a good game engine for grid/tile based games? Considering using one of those roguelike libraries like libtcod or whatever but I hate programming and if there's some engine or something you know of that handles a lot of the nitty gritty stuff i would much appreciate your recommendations.
In particular I would want it to handle stuff like rendering the grid, if i used godot for example I'd need to write my own code to take all my data about what's where in the grid and turn that into what you see visually.

I mean, rpg maker, okay. But that comes with a lot of bloat like whole stat and class and inventory systems and shit. I want less than that but more than like bitsy/puzscript. Maybe I'm too particular and my goldilocks engine doesn't exist and I need to learn to live with a less than perfect one. Playscii is intriguing but can't export a standalone project.

What's the best way to make a bunch of weird low poly character models. Or to get already made weird low poly character models that I'm allowed to use in a game. I've bounced off most 3d modeling programs I've tried besides trenchbroom (which I'm using to good effect to make the worlds but it's really not designed for character modeling). And magicavoxel but idk if voxel characters would really fit in the game world.

My big problem is most free lowpoly models are either trying to look cartoony and cute by leaning into the low poly aesthetic or are trying earnestly to best approximate human and animal shapes despite the limitations. Whereas I want all the characters in my game to look fucked up like monsters from bloodborne psx or kings field

Once again taking a crack at this and I've determined Blockbench works great and is intuitive for me. Despite some weird speed bumps and unintuitive quirks with how it interfaces with Godot I think I'm going to be using it a lot from now on.

I tried Crocotile. I don't know what's up with it, somehow my brain is shaped the exact opposite way a brain can be shaped from its developer and there's just maximum friction for every smallest possible operation, no keybind or mouse action does what I think it should do, button icons aren't helpful, menus are laid out weird, the documentation isn't useful and leans heavily on links to youtube videos...

(For what it's worth Blockbench's documentation is even more sparse, especially if you're not making content for minecraft, but I found I hardly missed it. There are a lot of options in menus that don't have tooltips that I would like to have an explanation for instead of just relying on trial and error, but at least trial and error actually accomplishes something as opposed to Crocotile where I end up ramming my head into a brick wall forever.)

Blender... It's still overwhelming. Blockbench does everything I need it to do, I'm happy with my little RC car, I don't need to get forklift certified.

Anyways I'm gonna be making a bunch of weirdo monsters and maybe you'll see them in a game I make someday.

It's run by crypto/NFT weirdos. They promote "Gandi IDE" which is a modded version of Scratch that adds gamedev-specific functionality (mostly multiplayer focused). It looks pretty innocuous until you stumble upon this little whammy on their about page:

For those who don't know, DAO stands for "decentralized autonomous organization" and is a term for when a project is governed by blockchain stakeholders. The about page has a gif of someone clicking "mint NFT collection" and then a spinning Ethereum token pops up. Currently everything on their "asset marketplace" is free, but I wouldn't be surprised if they are planning to make it run on crypto. They're also marketing this to kids!
Please just use TurboWarp instead, and steer clear of "Scratch Game Jam".
Or PenguinMod is probably also cool? Idk, I haven't looked into it at all.

I still haven't found a programming language that works better with my brain than scratch. It's a shame that the block programming concept has only really been applied to educational tools like scratch or lego mindstorm. If it were easily possible to compile a scratch project to a standalone program that would give a huge number of amateur game devs the ability to share their stuff past the walled garden. I feel like it would do for 2d games what twine did for text based ones

Found these: TurboWarp Extensions for various new features useful to game development that base Scratch doesn't have, and TurboWarp Packager for turning Scratch projects (including ones using TurboWarp extensions) into standalone programs.

Finally doing this and going back to Scratch for a game jam and it's unreal how much I'm getting done as opposed to fucking around with godot or unity or whatever.
It's very reassuring that I haven't actually gotten worse at making things, it really is the tools that were the problem.
And in fact I've gotten better! I'm applying concepts I've learned from these years of suffering with "real" programming and achieving things in scratch that I couldn't have before.
The only extension I'm using just adds deltatime + an fps counter, and I'm also using turbowarp's built in hacks to up the fps to 60 and change the stage's aspect ratio.