Engine for a Football Manager Type game (data driven, menu clicking) [closed]

Question

A friend and I had started developing a football manager two years ago, but ultimately squashed the whole thing because we found ourselves in a mess with developing UI and saving/loading.
The basic game loop of simulating matches and advancing days until the match day was already done. We also had a e-mail system up and running (for receiving messages which might need decisions/trigger events).
In our lack of of knowledge, we tried building the game in GameMaker2. It made saving all the objects (a Team has 23 Player, a league has 20 Teams, there are several Leagues) a nightmare. Also, UI development (things like scrollbars for example) ate up incredible amounts of our time and still everything looked relatively bland. Short: GameMaker2 seemed not suitable for the type of game we wanted to build.
There must be a better engine/system for developing a manager type game. Most of the game is spent in menus, There's no time-critical interaction going on. Since we've benched the project, I started working a legit software development job and I have gained some skills which I hadn't have before, like knowledge of databases and a heap of Python experience.

It has me looking at the game again. Now I see it as having a 'data backend' and an point-and-click-frontend, with game design elements, like tough decisions, events and goals as the driving force in the middle.
We want nice looking menus, where players can set the training schedule, make the line-up for match day, talk to players/executives/whoever. The other necessity is managing all data objects, which there will a lot of. A league might easily contain 400 players which all need to have stats and so on and so forth. I see a relational database for this, but maybe there's something smarter regarding game-development?

So my Question is:

What is a suitable game engine/development stack for developing data-heavy, non real-time menu-clicking type manager games such as a football manager?

Answer 1

I don't have GameMaker direct/specific experience but I hear/read this type of questions often. I would like to give you some consolation by saying that GameMaker isn't fit for UI-heavy projects but look at Kingsway for example.

The question template is "I failed with this game engine, is there a better game engine?". I'm sure GameMaker has its own limits (like all facilitated game engines) but the variety of games made with GameMaker is pretty amazing which makes me say that quite likely you didn't have enough experience to complete your idea. Have you considered starting from the scratch? In your situation I would not discard this path because even if you find the next game engine, you'll have another learning curve and you certainly learnt something very valuable (about GameMaker and more) from your (also very valuable) failure. You should think twice before throwing away what you learnt.

So, I could tell you to go Cocos 2D or Unity or even consider going with a HTML5 engine or go to a UI framework like Qt but are you sure you want to climb another learning curve?

I think you are in a good place. You realised that you failed and you need to understand the value of this awareness (that many don't get). You know you failed, you can now sit down and understand how, where and when you failed and learn from your mistakes.

Starting over is just the right move sometimes.

Also, when you start over you never really start over in the strict sense. There's always stuff you can refactor and reuse and it's a good feeling to see the things you did right and carry them over to your version 2.

I know it's a borderline answer but I this is what I sincerely think of your situation and I hope this helps and encourages you to make treasure of your failure and maybe fail again and then one day publish a real killer game!

Have fun!