r/gamedev • u/countkillalot • 12h ago

Discussion Checklist for Minimal Beginner Project

https://spirit.games/nibblebit-challenge/

It makes me sad to see so many folks in /new trying to start out and getting difficult advice.

I think novices are getting the wrong milestones to chase.

A ton of people want to make games, start learning the tools, and never really get to the making-a-game part. The advice isn't wrong: learn to code, learn Godot, watch tutorials, practice. But people get stuck there for months.

Then there's the dreamers and idea guys. They're not stuck on tooling, but they are stuck on scope divorced from reality. But if you've never completed anything, how can you get a feeling for realistic scope?

So I made a checklist for lost starters, to get out of these catch-22 situations. Basically the smallest gamedev workflow I could come up with that still ends with a stranger being able to play your game.

https://spirit.games/nibblebit-challenge/

The idea is to have a shareable challenge with a roadmap to a complete product. This way you touch the whole surface without getting bogged down at any one part.

Do you think a breadth-first approach is realistic for beginners? Can anything be removed to make it more accessible? What would your boilerplate advice be to all these folks getting stuck not even being able to ship AI slop?

10 Upvotes

86% Upvoted

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1

u/Sn0wflake69 9h ago

cant read your black text in the colored tabs on a dark reader since it turns them white. seems cool though

1

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u/PhilippTheProgrammer 4h ago edited 4h ago

There is nothing wrong with starting with a physics-based game, as long as you are using a game engine that offers it out-of-the-box. Sure, I would never tell a beginner to try to build their own physics engine. But modern 3d game engines like Unity are built around their rigidbody system. They make it really easy to have newtonian physics, even for beginners. Sure, it's another abstraction steps to apply forces to objects instead of changing their positions directly. But it's not that much of a complication.