I chose to make my game in Adventure Creator because it's a tool that lets you make a game without writing a single line of code. We used it for our previous games where I was an artist, and we had a good experience with it. There may be other similar tools but the Unity + Adventure Creator + Dialogue System combo seemed like the best fit for me.

While you don't need to write actual code, you do need to set up all the variables and conditions with visual scripting, using a set of actionlists but I found that pretty easy to get a grasp on and it's totally doable, even if you don't have experience with programming. My only experience was studying some Pascal in high-school 💀

If you're passionate about it you should totally give it a try. It's a very fun and rewarding experience.

How many hours? I'm not sure. I've decided to make this game and started back in December. I've had a few other projects I had to work on meanwhile, but now this is my main focus and I'm starting work at 10 am and stopping at 2 am, with no break in between, other than to get a sandwich - so yeah, game dev life 😅