I've got the ideas, content, and writing, but I don't know what people actually use to make the PDFs. Is it like, google docs and then turning that into a pdf, or do you pay for the Adobe Acrobat and/or Microsoft Word stuff? A website maybe?

If you need a Layout Software a free one which does the job is Scribus I used that for my first projects. Now I use Affinity which is one time fee but very nice. For the start Word works but if you want to dip your toes into layouting try Scribus.

I am a little weird, I use a combination of Word, Acrobat, Photoshop, and InDesign

Sometimes I use Illustrator and sometimes I use Corel Draw

Affinity Publisher. It’s great and not so hard to learn. Did use Scribus before and that was… weird. Also Affinity Publisher is in some sales for 50% off sometimes. Bought mine for 28 € or something.

I'm using this jam to learn Affinity Publisher! It's my first time using this program. But I used to use Photoshop + Illustrator :) 

But if you want, you can use even a Google Documents (online and free) and download as PDF 

I currently use Affinity Publisher, in the past I've done layout entirely with html & css ;-). Tried Scribus once and didn't know what I was doing, though that was probably inexperience and time pressure.

There's no shame in using Word or Google Docs though! IIRC Maze Rats was laid up entirely in Word, and it's one of my go-to examples of great, if understated, layout.

(youtube video linked since the itch page doesn't have any screenshots of the booklet)