I got

No coding experience

BOOM

If you can, could any of you help by dropping anything that you found helpful on your way to becoming a game dev? If you have more specific questions about anything, you can either leave it here or dm it. I'm mostly looking to try this as a solo dev, with a one month time window to do this, but who knows?

Honestly...I would temper my expectations if I were you. Game development is long and tedious, and it's even tougher if you're learning to program at the same time. I've tried making a fighting game about two years ago and it took quite a while even with experience...and I had to stop halfway both due to life and because unexpected things started coming up.

First off though since you say you've got no coding experience, you could try learning Python to grasp the fundamentals of programming, e.g. with a course like Python 4 Everybody. Then, you could move on to game development using an engine like Flash - even though it uses a different language, it becomes easier to switch languages once you learn the principles.

Alternatively, if you want to learn by doing, then you could start creating games directly - but I suggest that you make simple games for the time being (e.g. Pong, Breakout) to do so. Ordinarily I would suggest making the fighting game directly, but it wouldn't be ready within the time period and there's a chance that it'll discourage you from continuing.

If you don't have a lot experience in coding already then I don't recommend doing the solo route, at least work with a partner instead it should be not too hard to find one.

Starting with a fighting game might be a really big jump if you don't have any coding/game dev experience, so be careful! These kinds of games are some of the hardest to make because of so many design aspects (balance, game feel, etc.) and also hard to code a perfect system for.

But don't be discouraged! I suggest starting with learning something like Unity with C#, as it's both beginner friendly and also teaches you a very valuable and widely used programming language. Once you learn how to code well (which depends on your dedication could take not too long), you can experiment with different game design stuff to see what feels good and what doesn't, get your friends to play your games, etc.. And then it could be worth trying to start a fighting game. But also, a one month time window is very small for a fighter, even if you are an experienced game developer. So I'm not sure you'd be able to within a time limit unfortunately, or at least not this early :(

Good luck!

Like everyone said: Don't start off making a fighting game specially if you don't have code experience, do something simple and there's a lot of routes to choose from and the route that I have chosen is starting directly by making an simple game, I picked up the Haxe programming language and started by coding an game already by using the HaxeFlixel 2D Game Framework and the engine has an tutorial, some documentation, and an ton of demos that you can check the code of it to see you how it works, I picked up one demo of the engine and use it to make my simple game CarTrip, although you will have some times that you will create some questionable code but you can get better when you study programming more and will end up create good programming standards that will enter on your head.

BUT never start making an game without design (or all of your ideas put and defined from what your game is) and go directly to programming, this goes to everything programming related, you will end up doing nothing and be confused about your game most of the time, put your ideas on an document or something like that.

It's very important to learn game design too, read some documents and videos about how developers make their games, sources like the videos from the director of all Super Smash Bros. games or Game Maker Toolkit, YouTube has a plenty of these type of videos but always search around the internet.

About graphics and audio, well you can pick up an software and get some tutorials and articles about how to use the software, how to get better at graphics and audio and how to use it on games, there's the route of having an partner that can help you with these stuff and the route of using stock assets but you have to be aware over licensing of this said assets like the Newgrounds Audio Portal, they always have licensing terms on their musics.

That's all I got for you, you can go to the route of "making command line applications first to know about the programming language" if you want to, which no one will stop you, but I hope everything I said to you was helpful, if you don't like the HaxeFlixel engine that I talked about, Newgrounds has a good list of a lot of game engines among other things  BUT don't change game engines repeatedly, that may screw up your ambition on making an game, stick with one engine that you have more knowledge of it and if you do something like an 3D game, something HaxeFlixel is limited about AND has an knowledge of the engine that you were using before to make finished games, then you consider switching.

Anyways thanks for reading this all.

I'll keep it real with you, you don't want to start with a fighting game. Try a beat-em-up instead. Fighting games are some of the hardest games to do well - a lot of conditional branches and stuff just to make a functioning AI for the enemy fighter, and still more work required to make it fair for the player. Then you have hitboxes and framedata, and THEN you have universal game dev stuff like balancing and graphics, and music. Level design is one of the only things that's easier about FGs than other games.

A beat-em-up can scratch a similar itch, but is less demanding in AI compared to a fighting game, although you actually have to make an effort in terms of level design. And if you can make a semi decent beat em up, the fundamental skills you pick up will help you make a good fighting game. There are a lot of shared aspects between the two genres.

Also add a character with nunchaku. They're actually kinda easy to animate, more so than I expected back when I was animating shit, and they're also kinda just badass.

So coming back to this thread, I decided to take the advice of everyone who responded

I'm now currently looking into programming fundementals and the major differences between coding engines and languages, thank you all so much. After all the advice you've been dropping into this thread I just thought it'd be a good idea to come back and give some clarity, hopefully I'll be able to start up a new thread showing progress on what I'd like to make.

Thank ya'll!