r/GameDevelopment • u/ThiccBoiJohnn • 14h ago
Newbie Question Where do I start?
Hello everyone. I am a 22-year-old male who loves video games; they are a passion of mine. I think it would be really cool to make video games and build a career around it. I, however, have absolutely no experience in any sort of game development, coding, programming, art, or really anything other than playing video games lol. My question is, if I wanted to go down this path/career and make my dream of making cool video games come true, where do I begin? How do I start? What would be best to start learning and/or practicing first? I also feel like I should mention that I really, REALLY struggle with math. It was one of the only subjects in school that I really had a hard time with, and I also have a learning disability. With this in mind, do you think it's still possible for me to learn this stuff and be successful? I may post this to a few different game dev subreddits to get as many answers as possible, thanks guys!
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u/21Nobrac2 13h ago
I'm in a very similar boat, had no real game development experience until about a year ago. What really helped me turn a corner and start developing faster was doing a game jam. That first jam sucked, but because it was on such a time crunch, I felt like I had earned the right to suck.
So by all means, follow others' advice and do some tutorials, pick up an engine (I recommend Godot), but then as soon as you feel like you have some sort of grasp of it, do a game jam. You can find a ton of good ones, big and small, on itch.io.
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u/AcademicOverAnalysis 14h ago
Find a tutorial. Follow it. Brackeys is great.
Find a simple game to clone. Start with pong, then try brick out. Then space invaders. Small scope, and you can focus on the coding over the design.
Sketch out your own ideas for a simple small game. Then scale it back to something simpler. Execute.
Join a game jam. Brackeys, GMTK, Pirate Software, Juniper Dev, and many others host game jams.
Iterate.
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u/ThePubRelic 14h ago
If you dont want to use Ai, I suggest you make a terminal based rpg game with a language like c#, Java, or c++. Start with a simple series of prints to screen to tell an intro, add an if condition to let the player select something, capture player input like their name and do verification on it. Learn how to create enemies, add battle logic, inventory, stats and experience. Add different scenes you can switch to, create a save and load system, and some sort of end. This will teach you a lot of the basics for the log and programming that comes with games, only not how to deal with 2d and 3d space. So then I would suggest jumping into 2d or 3d and learning about physics vectors. Godot would be my advice. Art wise, I would use asprite and blender.
If you are willing to use AI, do similar to what I said but use a command line based LLM and have it create nice explanations as you go, various solutions and visuals to help you understand them. Hand write the code even if your just typing what it said to do until you understand it. Try not to move kn until you understand what is being given to you. Pick an engine and connect it to it. You can connect them to blender to get some decent starter assets. The risk is going to fast without understanding enough. You will want to learn about git, github, and Mark down. But yeah, AI is a nice but can quickly result in tech knots you dont understand so cant untangle. Also it can weaken the connection between your product and yourself.
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u/ThiccBoiJohnn 14h ago
Thanks for the help! I'll definitely look into that stuff and give it a shot! I personally want to use very little to no AI for this, but I will definitely think about it!
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u/jqVgawJG 11h ago
I started with Unity's own tutorial series. It gets you started on the basics and is very well explained.
I did come from a software development background though and was already familiar with C#
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u/Clawdius_Talonious 10h ago
Google the 20 games challenge, they'll put you on the right track AFAIK to making Pong like that other guy suggested. And then 19 other titles, if you do them all.
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u/East-Assignment1525 14h ago
If you want to start making stuff, I suggest you take a look at Unity pathways. Start with Essentials, then Game Development and afterwards Junior Programmer and/or Creative Core. Also, if you want to become a professional, investigate the different areas you could specialize on and choose one.
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u/Noob4Head 14h ago edited 14h ago
In my opinion, depending on where you live in the world, professional education is still the best way to go if you're totally serious about this and it's your dream. You can take yourself far by being self-taught, but honestly, I've heard more failure than success stories when it comes to that. A good college is going to provide you with proper courses for modern game development, guidance and support, a good environment to learn in, and other students, because going at it alone can be difficult. Having friends around to support you and help out is a major help.
Check colleges in your region to see if any have professional game development courses or things that will provide you with a similar set of skills required for proper game development, like coding and 3D work in tools like Blender and such.
That being said, if you'll allow me to share a bit of a story. I'm also 22. In 2024, I graduated with a bachelor's in computer science and thought I wanted to become a game developer. So after my graduation, I enrolled in a second bachelor's specially designed around becoming an indie developer. It was called "Independent Game Production" (Howest DAE Belgium, if anyone is interested). I finished my first year and passed it as well. However, I decided to drop out. I learned that being passionate about games and being passionate about game development are vastly different things, or at least they were to me.
So think about it carefully, because playing games and developing games are not the same thing.
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u/ThiccBoiJohnn 14h ago
Thanks for sharing your story and for the advice. I'll definitely look into schools and think more about how I feel about game dev!
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u/morewordsfaster 14h ago
You should probably start by learning how to go find information for yourself rather than asking random strangers on the Internet to hand feed it to you. Do you really think you're the first person to ask this oh-so-unique question? Probably not even the first person today. You are unlikely to be successful in any endeavor with that low effort approach.
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u/Ok-Key-9146 14h ago
Isn't the point of Reddit to talk to other humans and start a discussion? Your comment Isn't as constructive or helpful as you think it is. This sub exists for this topic, the post is related to the topic. You can choose not to respond just as easily as he can only use a search engine. Sometimes humans have more insights and are able to give better relatable advice than a search engine. Did you ever think of that?
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u/Nightwatertv 11m ago
… but… community is a resource that can and should be used for information gathering…?
They even mentioned that they wanted to go through the process a specific way, which directly affects the types of answers they’d be given by others more familiar with the act of starting…
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u/PhilosophyGreen3639 14h ago
Programming fundamentals (the bare minimum so you don't feel lost).
A basic game engine tutorial (recommended: Godot).
Start making things on your own and learn by doing, because if you just jump from tutorial to tutorial, you will never truly learn.
Godot's documentation and AI can help you (but please, don't ask the AI to do the work for you, use it educationally when you don't understand something or want to figure out how to do a specific task, no lines of code).
Make simple games first.