I want write something generic, I do not know the development cycle of FLARE therefore I cannot comment on  it. 

First of all will you be the only guy? This means you should be able to program, modify existing art, and design the game. In all cases I would recommend you to start with a tiny game (tetris, break out, astroids, minesweeper). You will learn alot of valuable knowledge from a tiny project and it will not be too hard to achieve. After finishing this tiny game, I strongly suggest you to try to improve it.   You can publish your code for review as well. At the end you will see lots of problematic parts. Unnecessary complexities. These will prevent you to write a larger project. Seeing these problems in a game will help you to avoid them later on. A more than necessary complexity will make that tiny game harder however, they will make a medium sized game impossible.

To summarize it, I recommend you to begin a tiny project to learn the process.

@Anonymous:

There is some documentation at https://github.com/clintbellanger/flare/wiki . However, it is far from being complete and partly obsolete; I think Clint has plans to create detailed tutorials sometime in the future, but I don't know when this will happen. In the meantime, it's probably the best to take a look at the existing Flare mods ( https://github.com/clintbellanger/flare/tree/master/mods ) to get an idea of how Flare works.

Hi, I'm one of the devs that work on Flare from time to time. Flare's documentation is quite lacking so far, but you can typically reverse-engineer the existing data files to create the effects that you want. I'd be happy to answer any questions you have about Flare.

It's totally possible to create a full game without touching any code. All you need to do is edit the data files and create maps, and the engine will do the rest. If you're interested in very advanced features the engine doesn't support (ask me if you're unsure), you'll need to know C++.

But to answer you question a little bit more fully, to create a completely new game using the Flare engine, you'll need to do the following:

1. Create New Art: Flare currently has a wonderful (and ever more polished-looking) set of base art assets. If you want to use this base art, feel free; it will save you a ton of time and effort.
2. Edit the Core Mod: This will include a lot of things, like the base look of the interface, the power list, the default enemy types, item types, music, etc. Once again, feel free to use the base data that Flare contains; it's quite good and ever improving.
3. Create a new Adventure Mod: You'll notice in the "mods" folder, there are two mods called "Averguard" and "Living Bones." Those are adventures in the game. These will contain maps, quests, npcs, and even special enemies like bosses. You'll probably spend most of your time creating the adventure portion of the game. Maps are the biggest part of this job. Clint and I both use a great map editor called Tiled to build the maps. I can go into mapmaking more later, if you'd like.

None of these steps are trivial, but only step 3 is required to make a new game for Flare. I'd recommend creating a short, new adventure that connects into the existing game to cut your teeth on. By the time you finish that, you'll basically be skilled enough to build a game how you like it.

Anon,

Glad to hear back from you! Let me try to answer your questions and issues:

Is base data things like music and characters and animation and art?

Correct. There is no code in the base data, but they contain default creatures, powers, items, interface images, sound effects, etc. Unless you plan on completely customizing the game (like building a futuristic post-apocalyptic zombie survival game), you won't need to edit this.

File types and editing:

You are right; the .po files are translations. You won't need to mess with those at all. As far as the other files are concerned, you probably won't be able to edit them properly in Notepad. For Windows users, I recommend the free/open-source editor Notepad++. Open up the files in that, and you'll see them as they are supposed to be. While the fields in those files may not make sense, I can explain those more in-depth as you need it.

Why are maps the biggest part of the job?

Mostly because you'll want lots of maps. From my experience, making interesting maps with interesting events takes the most amount of time. Since it sounds that you don't want to change very much about how Flare works, nearly all of what you'll do is make new content and maps.

I've wanted to make a Tiled tutorial for Flare for some time now. Maybe I'll actually get to it since there's obviously interest.