Wanting to make my own game. Where to start?

I've always felt like making my own video game but anyone else who has tried this can probably tell you that it quickly becomes a very daunting task. So I was wondering if anyone here had any good advice on this subject. I have basically no coding skills but am interested to learn. I have also been messing around with Unity 3D for a few days not really getting anywhere. If you happen to be experienced on this topic I would really appreciate some feedback, Thanks.

RPG maker is the daily deal on Steam right now, I'd guess that would be the easiest way to make a game but you may not learn very much to help beyond making generic jrpgs.

Did you go through the Unity tutorials? http://unity3d.com/learn/tutorials/modules

This may be worth a read http://www.pentadact.com/category/making-games/ It's the guy that made gunpoint in gamestudio.

XNA may be another thing worth looking into http://xbox.create.msdn.com/en-US/education/tutorial/2dgame/getting_started

I've been playing with RPG Maker. It awesome...with a few tutorials i was well on my way to making games.

If you have some sort of student email address you can get Microsoft Visual C, along with all the other Microsoft coding tools, as a student version for free. I would suggest you try to make minesweeper or something or maybe a card game to start. There are tutorials out there.

I would learn visual c.

Thanks for all the suggestions guys. I have thought about RPG maker but it doesn't really seem like the style of game I would like to go with.

Look at things like meetup.com for any Game Dev/Programming groups that might be around you. Nothing like being able to explain exactly what you want to make face-to-face with folks that have done it already. What you use depends largely on what your game is.

Funny, I've been wanting to make a game as well. I found what seems to be a really good site to learn Unity, so I've been following a tutorial that I'll probably finish today. Lots of good information here.

http://walkerboystudio.com/html/unity_training___free__.html

An absolute requirement for making a game is programming knowledge. If you haven't done much coding before, that is where you will want to start. I'd recommend any of the C-family programming languages, but if you're interested in using Unity, then C# would be the best option. C# is a higher-level programming language anyway, so it's a bit easier to pick up overall than C/C++. Also, remember to look online for tutorials and such. There are tons of them on youtube; I've watched several from CodingMadeEasy (his C++ and XNA/MonoGame tutorials are pretty good), and thenewboston has a pretty extensive C# tutorial series that teaches the language by coding Windows forms.

That said, definitely start small. It's all too easy to set out on a big project only to quickly be overwhelmed by how much is involved and give up. To get more acquainted with your chosen coding language I would recommend starting with some simple text-based programs, then move up to something like Snake, Breakout, Tetris, etc. Those basic games will teach you the fundamentals of how games are put together: content pipelines, update loops, user input, etc.

Of course there are other aspects of game-making as well, such as writing, art, etc. But without coding knowledge (or at least someone working with you who can program), none of it can really come together to form the core game.

I was actually looking at those Unity tutorials today, as I know C# and have been meaning to start working with 3D sometime (and it seemed like the best place to start), but man, what is up? There's nothing past the beginner tutorials, 3 are missing and the ones that are there are incomplete. I downloaded Unity almost a year ago for the first time and I don't think those tutorials have changed one bit since then!

Also I found XNA pretty easy to use, (and how I learnt C#), but I did have programming experience before. Made my first (and overly complex) game in Pygame, but found XNA easy enough to use to bash out a successful game in 48 hours in my first Ludum Dare. My first XNA game was a simple snake clone, that toyed with the idea of shedding your skin when you became a certain length (which made the walls you then had to avoid.)

So yeah, if you want a game, you really need to learn to program first.

@jjweatherman: That looks like great stuff thanks a ton! Programming is definitely the part that scares me the most but I guess I just have to start somewhere.