What is something like a hobby or skill that you belive almost anybody should give a try, and what makes your suggestion so good compared to other things?

i feel like this is a descent question i guess.

  • ShySpark@lemmy.fmhy.mlOP
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    1 year ago

    ive been wanting to get into game dev but it seems like alot of work and i suck at everything, also im limted with software and im not even sure what game engine or thing to use, if that makes sense. do you hav eany advice or something you want to share?

    • thegiddystitcher@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      I’m a hobbyist game dev also. Main advice would be that yes it is a lot of work and you may suck at everything, but the only way to get any better is to get started.

      Pick an engine, it really doesn’t matter which for the most part (I used to use Unity and recently switched to Godot, the way people evangelise the latter can be a bit offputting but as an objective user of both I can say they’ve got pros and cons like anything else). The exception being if you want to make a very specific kind of game like visual novels for example, then you’d be best served learning Ren’Py since that’s what the engine is for.

      Other than that, get something installed and hunt down some tutorials for it. Doesn’t matter if they’re irrelevant to what you hope you’ll one day make, you’re just trying to learn the basics here. Take what you learn in tutorials, and modify it in some way, that helps things sink in better and gives you more understanding about what your code (or your blender animation, or whatever) is actually doing and how it works.

      TLDR: Just get stuck in!

      p.s. there’s a few general “gamedev” communities on here so far but I think the most active one is !gamedev@lemmy.blahaj.zone (direct link). Check out the pinned post in there with links to neighbours like engine-specific communities etc. Someone is also organising a Fediverse game jam for next month so that could be a good way to join a team and get started doing small tasks on a game that you wouldn’t be able to make yourself yet.

    • hoodedsockmonkey@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Take a look at Gadot 4. As a beginner you can think of it like an open source unity. But they just had a major update and seems to make a lot of the tedious aspects of game dev and streamlining them. Everything is an object which is really nice and they have a scripting language based on python. Easy to read and write

    • Balssh@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Python with PyGame can be quite a good start. And if you’re just trying to build something for fun maybe use free assets from the internet.

      • thegiddystitcher@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        I can only assume you got downvoted for this because people think you’re advocating stealing assets. So for anyone else reading this, there are actually whole websites devoted to providing free assets for use in games.

      • rebul@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        Taught myself python at 50 years of age. My God, being able to code is like a superpower. I started out doing some things to make my job easier, later developed an interest in web scraping and data analysis, now I am tinkering with machine learning. I regret listening to people who told me that a strong background in math is required for coding.