Learning Game Development is not easy

I understand the feeling. I too started out with web development and have taken my own way into making games. To me it sounds like you don’t have a clear direction of what you want to make, you’re just trying to learn a fairly wide set of skills. Most “complete tutorial” books and sites I’ve seen have a pretty clear end goal. (The end result also usually doesn’t look particularly pretty, so maybe having bizarre looking mountains isn’t something you should worry about at this stage, if you’re trying to chart an equivalent path as you would with web development.)

My recommendation is to find some small game you can clone. Don’t focus yet on making something you can sell, focus on building the skill and confidence in creating something. Maybe it’s a platformer with a handful of levels, maybe it’s a top-down dungeon crawler with only two types of enemies and three types of attacks. Maybe the art is just cobbled together from random things you found. This will remove the pressure of having to design something. Creative work is hard work, and if you don’t know how to implement your ideas, it’s going to be even harder (because you can’t prototype and evaluate your ideas).

The other thing I would say is to keep it simple. Don’t build frameworks, don’t build systems (yet), don’t worry about don’t-repeat-yourself DRYness (yet), don’t worry about making it pretty enough to demo for a job interview or to sell—just do the simplest thing that gets you a working game, a “throwaway” game. Consider it a student project. Nobody really sells student projects (except the game Portal, but the end result doesn’t look anything like it did as a student project). Don’t worry about getting it to run on a bunch of different platforms. Remove as many things from the equation as you can and focus on getting that. Again, keep it simple. Only allow a thing to become more complex after you’re running into issues with how simple it is. Allow some or even most of your art to be gray boxes. Art can be polished later. Code can be refactored later. Gameplay can be tuned later. And maybe that’s something you get to, maybe not. Just get to the point where you can say, “I made a game.” At that point, you won’t need a complete course, you’ll need all of those little one-off tutorials.

Anyway, just my two cents. Good luck! (And feel free to follow up with questions, though keep in mind that nitty gritty technical questions might be out-of-scope right now.)

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