first i have to make art.
second i have to code the game
third i have to make a story for the game.
fourth i must make sure the game works
fifth i must make sure the game looks good.
sixth i have to make sure the controls work correctly
seventh i have to make sure the game doesn't have alot of bugs
You have the order wrong.
*First, you have to learn how to program. Pick up some language. It doesn't really matter which one, but a lot of the more popular ones like C++ and C# already have game frameworks built for them. Just pick something and start working with it. Read a book or do online tutorials with the language/framework you picked and learn how to use that.
*Second, you have to make a working system of your game. It doesn't matter what your story or art is. If your system doesn't work, it's not a game. As it is, a fighting game is a lot harder than it may look. Because fighting games are closely tied with their graphics, there's less you can do without any art, but there's still plenty of stuff to work on. For example, in a fighting game, each animation frame of a character should have a hitbox where they can take damage. For each animation frame of a melee attack, you need to also define hitboxes where they can do damage. Since this is a Touhou fighting game, it's probably safe to say that there's going to be projectiles, which are basically just independent hitboxes that do damage. Another thing you can work on that doesn't require sprites is controls. Movement, jumping, blocking, etc. Don't forget physics either. The physics of a fighting game doesn't need to be a reflection of reality, but make sure opponents can jump, fall, get hit against the wall, etc. You can use placeholder graphics like a red box to test that these things are working like they should.
*Third, you will need sprites. Normally I wouldn't say you need sprites this quickly in the game development, but fighting games are more dependent on their sprites than any other game that I can think of off the top of my head. In my opinion, if it's taking you this long to work on a sprite, you'd be better off finding some help. Work on one character at a time. For each character's animation frame, you'll need to define the hitboxes I mentioned earlier. This part may take a long time, especially if you want to balance your game a bit at this point.
*Fourth, you will finally have a basic fighting game, though probably it won't be that great yet. Now is the time where you add in special effects, sound, and such things. Step 2 was where you made the basis of any fighting game, but this step is where you customize it into your own unique system. Add a system to do super moves, think up a system of guarding, maybe even add in extra things like SWR's weather system (though most people hate that so think of something else, lol).
*Fifth, run a beta. You're not going to catch all the bugs yourself so have some beta testers play around with it and fix any bugs they report.
*Sixth, add the story. Now that you're sure everything is working properly, you can finally finish up. This should be easy in comparison to all the previous steps.
Also, for the 347985th time in this thread, we aren't telling you that you can't do it. We're just commenting on the fact that you don't have any confidence in yourself. If you yourself give up so quickly, no one else will be there to pick up the slack. What everyone is telling you is that you need to just suck it up and start working or just give up now because if all you do is talk about how hard it is, you'll never get around to doing it. To help get your mind off of how huge of a task this is, try splitting the project into little blocks. Get these little blocks of work done and you'll feel like there's progress, as opposed to just thinking of the project as a whole and thinking that you barely did anything.
