Hiya, I’ve been stuck wanting to develop games but struggling and ultimately keep giving up on projects. I started developing games over 5 years ago using Unity, but quit when they pushed runtime fees. I tried frameworks such as Love2D, Monogame, and Godot but I never really ended up learning them or enjoying developing games in them I think because I was too used to Unity.
My question is, what can I do to learn game dev from scratch again? My only limitations are no Unity, and I’d like to stay away from needing paid content. I want to develop both 2D and 3D games.
This is a tough one… for me personally, the only thing that can keep me going on a project is being interested in it. So I would recommend thinking about a thing you want to make and chasing that. The important part is to be able to break it down into smaller chunks that seems achievable and hopefully build on each other. That way you can see tangible progress along the way.
Once you get far enough along though it does become a lot of what feels like tedious unrewarding work… that I can’t really help with since I haven’t managed to get over that hump either! Haha. I think at that point you have to want to reach the end but maybe someone else can chime in with works for them at that point.
Hmm… what kinds of things are you struggling with? I’m not really sure what to suggest.
I’m guessing that maybe you feel frustrated that you don’t make as much progress as you used to or that none of the workflows in the other engines feel great to work with. Certainly, for the last thing, I would agree with you. Godot is still quite rough around the edges and I wish, in general, for better game development tools…
If my guess is right, I would try (in this order) making games with a smaller scope to get used to the new tool you are trying, continue exploring other frameworks to see if there’s anything you like better, or making your own tools to make games with.
Ultimately, I think you need to find what works for you. Since your question seems to be related to game programming, I can tell you what helped me in becoming confident in using Godot specifically and how I look for help when I am stuck. I followed a few tutorials before being stuck in tutorial hell where, at the time, I used AI to help me understand what was happening. This was obviously a bad idea as I didn’t feel like I was learning anything. So instead, I decided to take a game tutorial and then modify it, adding one feature/quirk at a time which forced me to explore different features of the engine. I started with Pacman and then made a turn-based tactics prototype based on Pacman. It was a frustrating at times experience because while the Godot documentation is good, it still has holes for someone new to the engine. I ended up looking at examples of how others did what I wanted to do and then started learning from it. Now after spending almost a year and half with the engine, playing around and making weird prototypes I feel like I have a solid understanding of how to get things done within the engine. I also watch a lot of twitch game dev Godot streams and if I find something interesting I ask the streamer how they managed to do it. I am still learning a lot, but I haven’t touched AI for Godot help in ages and won’t for any of my dev work. I’ve found decomposing a problem into small steps helps quite a lot. That way I have four or five small little problems which I can solve with my own knowledge or with the help of other resources like the docs or a dev discord instead of 1 massive discouraging problem. I hope some of this made sense and that I didn’t ramble too much.
Are there aspects of development that you would say you were most comfortable with? And the same for least comfortable? Barriers or points of frustration that stick out in your memory? I am curious.
For me the parts I’m most comfortable with is that I know how I would implement whatever I need to implement - If I have an idea I’m confident I could program it. Where I’m not comfortable is familiarity with the engine and it’s API and how to interact with it. Not knowing how to create an object or get and modify properties, how to signal between objects etc.