Okay! This is a workable start. The kernel of every walking simulator is level design, and you can begin to
greybox your ideas
right now inside of any one of dozens of already developed games with available level editors. Further, you can also get a leg ahead by scrapbooking looks and environments -- even if you only want parts of them -- by screenshotting and taking photos from games or real places that tickle your imagination.
Minigames are more particular, but there's plenty than can be done without too many technical requirements if there are pre-existing systems that you can leverage. A rigidbody physics system, for instance, can do a lot of lifting.
Now,
LSD: Dream Emulator is a curious touchstone for a project. Originally, it is a mostly handmade environment given dynamism through texture swapping and random placement of objects and the player. Contemporary tastes would ask for procedurally generated environments, objects, textures, music, etc.
Playable procgen is a very tricky thing to do, though it is comparably very easy to generate lots of random numbers and attach those to things.
What's your technical capacity, anyways? You mentioned that you own several versions of RPG Maker -- have you made anything in those systems yet? Are you comfortable with scripting? Have you written C# (applicable to Unity and Godot)?
There's a fan-recreation of LSD in Unity that you could use as a starting point:
A fan made remake of the cult-classic game LSD: Dream Emulator.
lsdrevamped.net
He offers an SDK which you could use to extend on that work, presuming that you want to build something that is basically LSD -- 90% of the engineering has already been done for you. Naturally, this binds you to learning Unity (2021), but also Lua since he doesn't expose the internals directly.
LSD: Revamped SDK # Welcome to the documentation for the LSD: Revamped SDK. LSD: Revamped is a fan-made modern recreation of cult-classic PS1 game ‘LSD: Dream Emulator’. The SDK (Software Development Kit) gives you the ability to make mods for LSD:R using the Unity editor. The SDK itself comes...
sdk.lsdrevamped.net
And, towards the thread query, LSDR runs just fine on my 2013 i5-4570R/Iris 5200.
Your system, while newer, benchmarks just above 50% of the CPU performance of mine (though about 70% in single threaded performance, which is probably more important). GPU performance is just about on par, which is the more critical spec.
That said, you're on a 15watt laptop part with what I'd consider a comfortable minimum for RAM on modern systems (8GB). The Godot and Unity editors will run fine for you, and Unreal literally won't have space to install. Modern Blender will work, technically, but will explode the moment you try to change the viewport rendering engine -- I'll link 2.79 and 2.93 below, which will work on your machine. You can try with later versions of Blender (3.3 or 3.5, for instance), but it'll get risky the higher you go. I'll assume you're running windows.
- Blender 2.79: Pre EEVEE, pre PBR, pre Dark UI. This is a version of Blender that speaks the same language as a lot of older engines and titles (diffuse, specular), and for which a lot of older tutorials exist. It also uses an older UI scheme, before Blender went off to chase Maya. I used to run this on an old 2008 laptop.
- Blender 2.93: NuBlender, but Pre New-NuBlender. This version will run comfortably and look more like modern blender. There should be a fair amount of tutorials available which will apply. It speaks to a Physically Based Rendering shading model, which is a more expressive and artist-friendly (because it speaks to real world material properties) way of determing what colors your GPU spits out, and which also matches the default shader vocabulary of modern engines.
I'm going to link some other tools that might be handy in your quest:
- Spacescape. A skybox generator. Cannonically builds nighttime starry skies, but you can use this to also build some daytime looks. It exports as PNGs, if you want, so you can load them into a photoeditor and blend with other graphics.
- Paint.NET. Probably the best free image editor on Windows, save for Krita and then GIMP -- both of which are magnitides more complex and artist-focused.
That said, Pyrite64 looks pretty interesting. But, it'll be a shame to build something that can't really be played native.
More thoughts later, though. Dogs are needing to be walked.
