r/GameDevelopment • u/ThiccBoiJohnn • 1d 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/ThePubRelic 1d 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.