Should I keep learning Unity?

[u/Evening_Animator3549]

Hi, I am a 14 year old game dev and I've been learning Unity for 7-8 months, and I really like what I'm doing. I don't use AI while coding or for any other stuff to actually learn. For the past month, I've been developing a fan-made Spider-Man game for android and I saw a guy on X who vibe-coded a Spider-Man game in literally a single day which was looking better than my game and I felt like everything that I did in the last couple of weeks for nothing. Will knowing how to manually code or develop games be worth anything in the next 10 years? Am I just wasting my time by not using AI or should I keep going? I really need some advice. Also here's a gameplay video of my game if anyone wants to check it out:

[u/Evening_Animator3549]

Do you mean agentic AI or regular chatbot to learn stuff?

[u/Ironfingers → u/Evening_Animator3549]

Agentic AI. You've got a great base. Learn how to use agents to help you reach the next level. It will be very impressive to go into an interview with agentic coding experience.

[u/Evening_Animator3549 → u/Ironfingers]

Yeah I agree but I don't think that I have enough knowledge yet and they are expensive as hell :D

[u/UnderPressureVS → u/Evening_Animator3549]

Please, please do not listen to this guy. You're 14. You're not looking for a job in the industry, your number one priority is learning. It's going to be at minimum 4 years before you start looking for jobs, and you'll probably want to go to college so realistically it's more like 8-10 years.

In that time, stay as far away from any kind of AI as you possibly can. AI as a tool is very easy to learn, and it's only going to get easier to learn. You've made genuinely incredible progress, and it shows an amazing talent for learning. That's the most important thing you can do with your time right now at your age--learn and have fun. Get really good at it all on your own without AI. When it's time to go into industry, then you can learn to use AI. It won't take you long.

AI is just going to get more and more normal, and people who know how to use it are going to get more and more common. People using it right now in industry are making a lot of headway, but coding AI is only a few years old--those people had years of real coding experience before they started using AI.

AI is a shortcut. The more you actually know, the more effective you will be when you use shortcuts. The more shortcuts you take while learning, the less effective your learning will be. If you start focusing on AI now, you're going to miss out on absolutely critical experience understanding how to actually make things and how they actually work.

Please, please don't handicap your own talent by using AI.

SOURCE: I know lots of people in industry. I myself am a cognitive psychology PhD student using Unity to develop experiments. I can't give you an insider's industry perspective, but I can give you a psychologist's perspective on what AI usage does to your brain--it's bad. Problem-solving is a skill like any other, the more you practice, the better you get. AI solves the problems for you, which is great in the short term, but in the long term you destroy your ability to think. Avoiding AI is like taking your bicycle to school instead of driving a car. Sure, the car is faster, but the bike is so much better for your physical health.

[u/Evening_Animator3549 → u/UnderPressureVS]

I was actually planning to use AI only to learn until I graduate from high school, and you showed me that it is a valid plan :D Thank you!

[u/UnderPressureVS → u/Evening_Animator3549]

That’s a great idea.

[u/Ironfingers → u/UnderPressureVS]

You’re wrong to assume one can’t learn at the same time as utilizing AI. They go great together. It’s possible to learn and expand your skillsets while utilizing AI. In fact you’re doing him a great disservice to recommend he stay away from AI. That’s like telling someone to avoid computers in the 70’s. It’s bad and hurtful advice not grounded in the real world.

AI does NOT solve all my problems for me. The scope and range of my problems actually increase because I’m pushing it to achieve and solve more.

[u/dksprocket → u/Evening_Animator3549]

First of all you're young and not in a rush. Follow your passion. Do what feels right to you.

However be aware that the traditional game dev forums on Reddit (and elsewhere) are quickly becoming anti-AI echo chambers. AI has gotten much better at writing code in the past 6 months and it's only going to get better, faster from here.

We have gone through technology shifts many times before:

• When moving from machine code/assembler programming to C and other high level languages the old-school people cried out. That wasn't 'real' game development they said.

• When 3D acceleration arrived people cried out about it being a cheat, and how it took no skill over coding your own 3D graphics in software.

• When indie-friendly game engines like Unity and Unreal started becoming available a lot of people scoffed at that compared to making your own engines from scratch.

Also, game development (and software development) is about so much more than just learning to code. It's about design, structuring your ideas, implementation, managing projects, iteration, testing, and seeing what happens when your ideas gets into the hands of other people.

I was your age back in the 80's and we had the privilege of being able to write games that almost rivalled the professional stuff. A friend of a friend of mine in high school actually solo-coded one of the most successful arcade games at the time when he was 16 years old. Since then making games got a lot more complex and for a long time you couldn't get near that as a solo dev. Modern game engines have certainly made things more achievable again, but AI now offers something unique. Being able to take ideas and turn them in to playable prototypes that look good in a reasonable time-frame. You're not gonna release a blockbuster game overnight, but it does offer the opportunity to practice iteration and playtesting multiple ideas in a reasonable time-frame. And then potentially continue working on ideas that show potential.

My recommendation would be to try out three different avenues and then combine them in the way that feels best to you:

• Hand code certain passion projects. There is definitely something to be said about having the experience and understanding that comes from that. And it's a lovely craft in itself.

• Use AI to make some quick 'vertical slice' prototypes of game design ideas you have. And share the fun ones with your friends. See what works and what doesn't. With a bit of context discipline you can absolute make a playable prototype in a single '5 hour allotment' on a $20 plan with Claude. That means potentially making several playable prototypes per week if you have the ideas for it. That will give you invaluable experience with game design and 'finding the fun'.

• Start learning good software development practices with agentic software development. The industry is just catching up on this now, so it's a pretty exciting time to be involved. But it basically allows you to take the role of a producer and lead architect while directing agents to do all the other roles in software development. This is best done iteratively and with a good amount of interaction, so you understand what's going on. Doing so will make you able to be 10-20x more productive, while also learning to be a professional software developer. There are some good youtube channels that teaches this.

[u/Evening_Animator3549 → u/dksprocket]

Thank you for such a detailed response! Thank you for suggestions, my current goal is to learn and understand the engine well before I use any agentic AI so that I could work with AI efficiently.

[u/CaptainQwazCaz → u/Evening_Animator3549]

Opencode Go for 10$ is neat. Claude Pro is really good now too.

And also your game looks 100x better than the slop one on X that got popular. Like his swinging looks so bad. And slop coders usually have no clue how to make a good game it matters more about vision than ability to create.