Hey, I actually started out as an electrician, then started learning 3DSMax, after few years I was getting good at it, then went to electronics college where I’ve learned all the Math , Physics and Programming theory, we weren’t taught in such detail as they learn in the computer science course but seems like that extra background is not that important.
I wasn’t really interested in electronics that much at the time so I never finished to get a degree, however as said I did learn the whole package related to Programming.
At same time when I was studying I was playing Unreal Tournament 2004 and started to learn about game dev. , after UT3 was released I started learning the UE3 editor and level design, soon my 3D models were getting better and I started learning unrealscript , we also formed a team and competed at 1mill$ make something unreal contest and got an honorable mention, then when the first UDK was released I even recorded a introductory tutorial from what I have learned.
With the team we wanted to keep working in UDK and create a PC game but lack of resources, and several other problems made this goal out of reach for us, thou we did invest a lot of time and made some awesome assets, we never even got to the demo part. After that I have learned a lot about all this game development and our limitations as an indie game developer that supports himself working other kind of jobs, so I switched to making something simple instead, something I know I can finish, in December 2011 I released Jumpy Frogs iOS game, at the time it felt really great to finish it and I felt really proud on the visuals. The game was created on PC, using UE3 UDK editor and unrealscript. I helped on the forums with what I’ve learned and also visited UDK chat often.
Since this was my first game released and I made several mistakes including no marketing plan, I was only loosing money and was forced to stop doing this and get back to working other things.
As years passed by, I have been working many other things, including programming simple scripts for some other game engine, building websites and freelancing. Then UE4 was released, and it is amazing, so now I’m updating my first game and trying to fix everything I did wrong with the first version, I also learned a lot about marketing and monetizing, but there are still limitations, like I don’t have a Macbook , I can’t afford yet to pay for all the licenses and so on, so my priority still has to be working other jobs and projects. Few months ago I got some job as a html5 / javascript / jquery programmer, they were promising a lot but after 250+ hours, they still owe me money and they did not give me a full time job like they were saying, even thou it is a respectful company I now have doubts and am looking for other projects at the moment, I say this so you can imagine working like this can be annoying.
Anyway of course I will keep working, I am also developing a side scroller game using the frog characters from the first game, and this will be a lot better opportunity to finally make some great looking levels and artwork and fun gameplay as well as make everything work.
I know this is a long story but I wanted to explain my learning path, and in my opinion programming is not that hard, it is important to have a good understanding of the basics, but the real experience is gained when working on projects, solving problems and bugs and being creative. Knowing “Math” is most of time not that important , and even when it is you can just google it find some resource and learn about that topic and that’s it, there are are lots of great videos about math and physics on you tube.
You should take programming as something you learn slowly, no rushing or anything, but keep your goals of making something and stick to it until you do, you may get there in six months or in 2 years or more, depends on your goals and effort, but there is no doubt you can do it !
