GottaHaveFaith

Lenovo Legion. If you pick a configurable one and remove windows they’ll lower the price accordingly (sometimes 100€ for windows pro). Some models offer Linux pre-installed.

Steam did an amazing job on the controller management, you can already remap everything. Disabling track pads should be easy

Looks really nice! Thought it was a terraria clone at first, will check out the reviews

Edit: bought it since it’s 75% off, played around 2 hours, it’s pretty entertaining, I’m not a super fan of this kind of turn based combat in general, but we’ll see

In my opinion, for your situation, AI is not going to help if you don’t know enough programming ALREADY, what is probably going to happen is that you’re going to achieve a certain progress and then get stuck.

I suggest you take a look at no code/low code solutions since your game does sound not too hard to make.

Take a look at rpg maker and construct 3

You’ll be able to use AI for the scripting you’ll need.

I had a friend use rpg maker with success in the first years of high school, before “the internet” was available, and he knew nothing about programming (he’s now a doctor)

I think most selfhosters already know/use Linux, so management issues are already known. About the ease of use, if you manage services with docker it’s really easy to bring them up/down, and if you want some GUI there’s portainer.