Is this the right tutorial for me? Opinion needed!

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Hello all!

So to give a bit of context, I’ve been making game professionally for quite a while now. I occupied several roles, from content creation to direction and management.

My heart though, as always been in making smaller more creative projects. and I always been appealed by the promise of building a game that I could totally own using open source engines.

So I finally kicked myself in the butt and started fairly consistently do some Godot tutorials on how to make simple 2d games.

Here’s the thing!
As stated above, I make games for a living for a really long time so game engine in general is not really an issue to me. (and Godot is no exception really…) super beginner tutorials like what is an animation editor or what is a .png are not really needed for me and makes a lot of beginner tutorials filled of not super useful or redundant info for me. not to say it is useless because I need to understand the logic and structure of Godot but I don’t need 30min videos to get the point. which is why I was tempted to jump in an intermediate tutorial to start with…

BUT! I never, ever, ever learned how to script code or even do visual scripting. I am determined to learn, yet I am… suuuuper green.
I understand the high level concept of coding, enough to elaborate plans with my fellow tech colleagues and programmers but until last week I never really wrote any functioning lines of ‘‘code/script’’

So I would love to have your help so I don’t give up once again…

Right now I’m doing this tutorial: [Create a Complete 2D Survivors Style Game in Godot 4: (https://www.udemy.com/course/create-a-complete-2d-arena-survival-roguelike-game-in-godot-4/)

so far so good, I like the approach, nice tuts I think, I go through the videos but something really annoys me. this is clearly dedicated to people who has a foundation in scripting (whether Godot or anything else) and I don’t have that skill set :stuck_out_tongue:
I have no effin clue what am I writing and I feel its a bit pointless as I don’t feel I learn how to script. like 85% of the time I just execute being completely lost… I correct my syntax until it compiles as explained and that’s pretty much it.

So my question to you is! (sorry super long intro I just want you all to fully get the situation:P)

Is this a good way to learn???..

Should I continue this ‘‘intermediate course’’ even though I barely understand what is going on scripting wise

or;

should I move to something else right away that is more coding logic before tackling this tutorial…

I know it is super open ended and though to answer clearly but since I never been through that kind of tutorial I was curious to see if there was any similar cases here who been through this and was like ‘‘Oh yeah I was like you at first and at the end I could script some basic stuff on my own’’ or was more like ‘‘completely forgot everthing as soon as this was behind me…’’

I hate feeling I’m in a fog and just blindly move forward so when this happens, I tend to say f*ck it and stop…

so I am really hoping someone can tell me something like ''don’t worry we’ve all been through and its not a waste of your time! :stuck_out_tongue:

cheers, looking forward to read you!!

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Looking at the course description I found this line:

Who this course is for:
Intermediate programmers

Even if you have experience in other fields of gamedev, this might not bequite the right course for you.

If I may recommend a course, I found this one to be great: (the price looks steep, but you can find bundles of their courses with very big discounts regularly)

The lesson pacing is great (I’m usually quite impatient), the instructor is excellent and explains concepts of programming in a way that is practical but also builds understanding of the concepts.

And to your last points:
Yeah, just keep on pushing through, even if you don’t get something the first time, it builds a foundation that you at some point just fall back on without thinking about it, almost like riding a bike.

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thanks, I’ll definitely keep an eye on this course!

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pretty funny coincidence, the course went from 100 to 17 over night… bought it and will start it tonight! thanks for the reference

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I’ve taken my share of courses (and still continue to do so). I didn’t feel very good about the first couple of game development courses I took. But, kept at it and things eventually started coming together. Here are one or two things that stand out from my experiences so far:

  • Accept there will be many, many things that we don’t know we don’t even know about yet (* is there a better way to say it?).
  • Our time, focus, and energy are extremely valuable, make sure to invest each wisely.
  • Learning to program is a process. It begins with getting familiar with an IDE, code syntax, and the basics of how code elements can work together.
  • The way we make sense of things is by using DIKW; first we take in Data, from which we build Information. This leads to Knowledge we can start putting into use. Eventually this develops into Wisdom that allows for deeper insight (according to the field of information science).
  • Don’t approach learning a programming language in the same way we might learn a second language like Spanish or Japanese. Instead, we’re learning about how to make use of a huge box of lego-like bricks and the infinite ways they come together to make something cool. Or, we can think of it like a carpenter’s workshop - lots of tools, ranging from the simple to complex, available to use and create our own jigs which we can use to create smaller pieces of a thing that becomes part of a larger whole.
  • Beware the instructor that wastes time walking through every possible code feature or IDE item in turn. Instead, look for the instructor who demonstrates how a few features work together to produce something that is useful.
  • When taking a course, don’t ever assume the instructor is teaching ‘THE WAY’ of doing something. Instead think of it as only ‘ONE WAY’ (out of many possible other ways) of doing something.
  • Often, courses and tutorials start slow and the pace quickly ramps up. This is known as a ‘squirrel catcher’. It’s a way for folks to find out early on if this activity suits them. If someone is not able to get unstuck or keep up when the course starts moving faster, then they may not be ready for it. Game development and programming is all about problem solving and we might as well come to grips with that situation as early as possible.
  • If a course is not teaching us how to use a language’s documentation, take it as a red flag against the quality of the course. Learning to use documentation is critical for developing our own projects.
  • Move on to our own (small) project as soon as we can. Applying our knowledge is the only way to begin growing our skills.
  • Game development courses are largely created for and marketed toward beginners (because that’s were the money is).
  • Most courses teach only a basic introduction to game programming and utilize spaghetti code to keep things moving and understandable. To move forward, a much deeper understanding of programming is needed to progress projects beyond what is demonstrated in a typical course.
  • It’s hard to find good tutelage for learning programming skills. We have to be creative and likely find several complimentary resources that will help us start building this information. Consider this; a good way to learn programming with GD Script might be a class on C#. Why? Because popular battle-tested languages tend to have the instructors who teach actual programming skills. Game engine courses usually provide very little insight into how and why we need to write clean code.
  • Accept that most of the code we write will need to be changed and/or rewritten (refactored) later (yet another reason to strive for learning to write clean code).
  • Accept that learning to code can be a lonely undertaking. Our significant other, family member, or friend will not share our euphoria when we finally begin to understand the power of polymorphism and inheritance.
  • Accept the idea of becoming a ‘solo game dev’ is going to be insanely difficult despite what many courses advertise.
  • Because game dev is hard, the desire to team up with others might occur before we are ready. If our role in such a team up means we will be sharing coding duties with others, we must first pause and ask ourselves this: Can we stand to look at the code we wrote just last week? If not, it is likely because we’ve learned to use better variable names and code structures since we fabricated that past mess? So, if we can’t stand to look at it, we can’t expect others to tolerate our clumsy code either.
  • Accept that the bugs we encounter are in the code we write, not in the IDE.
  • Accept that one day we’ll spend at least four hours trying to get a simple button to work.

With that off of my chest, the only advice I’ll offer is to strap in and enjoy the journey, because the destination is an evolving target.

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Thanks for the advices, I decided to go with a simpler more beginner friendly tutorial and even though some elements are sometimes too basic it feels a lot less daunting already and I have a better grasp of what am I currently doing!

for some ot the points you brought, I fully agree with you it is important to keep in mind it is not THE way to make games.

on that note, I’ll be looking at some C# tutorials too! udemy is 90% in discount anyway, I’m sure I’ll find something at the price of a starbucks latte! :stuck_out_tongue:

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I’ve partially done both of the mentioned courses and I’m not sure if they are ideal for getting started, especially since you stated that you barely understood what was going on.

Imho the best way is to learn the basics (variables, scope, functions, classes, loops, types for example). I don’t think most of the tutorials do this very well when creating a game. They are good to learn more about the engine, the language and how certain functionality can be implemented into a game.

The only thing I came up was the following video. It actually starts with the fundamentals, but requires you to download a project (if you like to follow along to try it yourself). Right now there is only Part 1:

EDIT: And it is free. :slight_smile:

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thanks,

I’m dedicated to learn once and for all so I’ll just take anything that is worth caring and will list to my to do list and continue as long as I feel I need to learn more before jumping in seriously

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honestly, you will find any kind of tutorial out there to help you to what you needed to make anyway, the more the better, only time will tell which one will be used more and better once you have lots of hours into making your game in godot

what you want to make, you search it, you watch and learn it, have bugs, not what you expected? you asked here or actually search the solutions yourself to fix the bug, repeat

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I found the new Brackey’s tutorial (YouTube channel) into Godot very helpful. I haven’t programmed in a game engine for over 2 years and while I don’t understand all the concepts very well, I found the code fairly straightforward (with some differences of course). I have already started making small changes to things, added the sound in myself (that I thought were easier than the tut) and want to make more changes for instance the enemies are floating with no gravity, that “must” change.

Been a really good introduction into Godot and looking forward to more of his tuts his Unity tuts used to really good.

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Most free tutorial online is pretty straight forward or lack of explanations to make a newbie understand what is what.
In other hands, Brackeys did a good job explaining it to people like they are 7 years old to understand how to use or do something with godot. i could say it’s a skill too to be able to do that.

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Thanks for the feedback, indeed, tutorials on YouTube often don’t show properly or worse, starts with part 1 and part 2 never arrive :sweat_smile:

I found out that some gamedev.tv tutorials were quite good, especially the 2d one. But it’s still limited to what is done in the projects. I’ve started the 3d one but felt redundant to what I did during the previous but I still try to go over it for XP. Next one is multiplayer for beginners so I can already start thinking about my coding approach. Then lastly I have to go back to the original tutorial that generated this thread:) after that I think I’ll be comfortable starting my first prototype!

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The best advice I’ve heard is to make 3 full projects from tutorials (where everything in the project is from the tutorial) to learn how the engine works. And then make a 4th project which is your own creation (you can still look up stuff when you stuck) but overall it should be a big congomeration of stuff you’ve borrowed and stuff you’ve came up with yourself. Wish I had heard that advice back when I was first learning gamedev.

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