Just looking for inspiration , and bit of advice on game development process and what is achievable and what is needed to be supplied from other sources .
Bit of background-
I’m just having hobby for programming , game engine came to me as great way to practice and solve problems in code with creating interactive environments.
I have 2nd week of experience with Godot engine ,
previous experience done university courses for python which included all basic concepts of Python itself ( more then crash courses )make simple text based room rpg , mastermind game for practice loops ,cypher breaking for finding hidden message , dictionary, sets … some basic PyTorch and TensorFlow , pygame - alien invaders
Swift - numerous LTSM , prediction text and SwiftUI based apps , simple ping pong SpriteKit based game .
C# in known game engine just week as compatibility and other issues discouraged me
What can I expect ?
Having 2-3 hours a day for studying , making progress in game , what is best to focus on?
lots of people say about tutorial hell, does it means read more on forum and try understand and find ways in docs ?
vfx, music, art definitely makes games unique , do you guys spends time as solo project with creating all those resources or is better to hire somebody and use them to bring vision to life ?
Game jams - does it make sense for people starting out to try taking part in them or is it something for more experienced developers?
Successful story of solo developers with Godot engine
do you know some people which made decent game as indie solo developer?
“Sneaky Sasquatch” - two people team , not sure of engine , successful story as one of the top games on Apple Arcade ( vfx , art , music is credit to others ) so not sure if this still applies as two people team .
General question-
Do you making living with development ?
As a programmer myself with over 10 years of C# experience, I was lucky enough that I had some basic understanding of programming when I started game development, and I joined a project that was already doing quite good.
This helped me quit my job, and while I barely made any money at the time, it was enough to sustain myself just enough so I can dedicate every day to learning.
Currently I’m involved with several projects which help me earn more, but in all honesty it’s all about what you want to pursue. Even if I made a lot more money, or I suddenly got a large sum, I wouldn’t quit game development at all, I’d just focus more on personal projects.
As for what to focus on, it’s really up to what you enjoy doing the most. When I was getting started, it helped me a lot to just download an open source game and start changing stuff in the code to see how things worked.
GDScript is very similar. I, myself, am a python dev and I barely felt the transition
Lots of people say about tutorial hell, does it means read more on forum and try understand and find ways in docs ?
I find the docs quite comprehensive, and the forum here is quite welcoming
vfx, music, art definitely makes games unique , do you guys spends time as solo project with creating all those resources or is better to hire somebody and use them to bring vision to life ?
For my game Hepatomancy I did the music and the models myself - but I have an incline for it. I did grab SFX and a couple of animations from somewhere else
Game jams - does it make sense for people starting out to try taking part in them or is it something for more experienced developers?
It’s nice to participate to a Jam! It helps by giving you a small project and a time limit
Thank you for responding,
Does those jams provide assets or jams means rather some topic with description of behaviour ?
If you could recommend some beginner friendly it be great , many thanks
You can go to the Godot Asset Library and search for “projects”, and you’ll see plenty of great ones you can take apart / modify to your heart’s content!
That’s a great start. Everyone starts at the beginning. Godot is a great engine for learning more. It is a very well-constructed modern language.
I love tutorials. I actually find them somewhat peaceful and meditative, as I just get to follow along with what they are doing. If you have money to spend, I highly recommend the Godot courses over at GameDev.tv. They are well done and super helpful.
I recommend you make a game and then look up tutorials to help you do the things you don’t know.
Unique is nice in the long term, but fun in a game is much more important. While you’re learning, I recommend you use assets made by others. Then you’ll know what you like and don’t like, and if you want to spend time making your own assets. Based on the amount of time you have, you would likely never get to making any games if you made your own assets. Making assets is very time-consuming.
Escalona Music has a great little free pack of music. Dillon Becker also has a free voiceover pack with five voice actors that will get you started. FilmCow has a pack of hundreds of free sound effects.
ELV Games on itch.io has a ton of music and their sound effect library is impressive. I strongly recommend their music pack. Their composer PegonTheTrack is really good and you get a TON of music for any genre of game. Ovani Sound has great music and really awesome sound effects. They are very expensive, but they have amazing sales. About twice a year they sell a huge pack of music and sfx on Humble Bundle for about $20. If you are on their mailing list, every 2 months or so they release a HUGE music and SFX pack of all new stuff for $20. (They just released the most recent one on Friday - two days ago. If you can still get it, it included 170 songs in 17+ different genres, and thousands of sound effects, and a voice over pack with hundreds of voice clips.)
Game jams are great for learning. I strongly recommend the Godot Wildjam which happens once a month and lasts 9 days. That’s enough time for you to be able to try making a game. Voting in a game jam is a huge learning experience too because you learn things from what other people did. You also learn what makes games fun, and what others accomplished in the same time frame. Short game jams that are only a few days can be learning experiences too if you have a free weekend. But with only 2-3 hours a day you need something that lasts longer. Game jams aren’t about winning in my opinion. They’re about finishing a project and getting feedback on it so you can do better next time. They are for anyone who wants to do it, and they will help advance your game development skills quickly because you have to have a working product on a deadline.
Stardew Valley comes to mind. It was famously solo-developed by ConcernedApe. He made all the assets and the game. It took him years. (Asset development is time-consuming.)
Yes. I’ve been a professional developer for almost 30 years now. I worked in the game industry for 5 years. Indie game development has been a hobby but I’ve recently moved into it providing my income. (I currently make a lot less money than I used to.)
As for assets, there may be problems with ready-made ones (there are often questions on this topic here). So it’s better if you learn how to make them yourself. You can start with the simplest ones, if only so that you can understand the problems with them. There are programs that make it easier to create your own assets, a sample list is here.
I love making games but honestly AI is going to reshape how games are made in the next 3-6 years so I stopped working on my own projects. At such a beginner stage yourself, it’s reasonable to expect to spend at least 2-3 years of learning how to develop games before getting decent enough to make something that will sell, which will take another 2-3 years at least, unless you are just making something extremely simple like Bejeweled or something.
If you just want to play around and have fun with Godot, by all means do what you enjoy. If you want to make games as a career, I personally would not bother learning the current tech stacks as they will be irrelevant in a few years time. It’s more likely in a few years time that we will be talking to AI assistants and they’ll do most of the tedious legwork of actually constructing the game while we focus on the more creative aspects.
@Dream Maybe. Have you tried vibe-coding a game yet? I’ve done it with Claude. It’s really cool for about 30 minutes, and then it’s underwhelming. I’ve also been playing around with Suno for a month or two now. It’s really cool, and I’ve made some fun songs, but the results are always “good enough” and your expectations have to be pretty low.
Yes, it will get better. But LLMs don’t process natural language the way you and I do, so fine-tuning is going to be the purview of humans for longer than a few years. And fine-tuning will not be done with AI, but using the tools that AI emulates - like Godot.
MIT just put out a report a week or so ago that only 5% of businesses that have invested in AI have actually seen any ROI so far. 95% have been failures. Also, OpenAI just had a big setback with GPT 5. Beside people not liking it as much as 40 personally, it was not answering factual questions correctly and did not have the even higher level of intelligence claimed.
AI is a useful tool, and definitely worth learning. But if you don’t know how to do something and you rely on AI to do it for you, how are you going to check to do it right? The biggest problem with AI across all industries is you have to check its work. LLM manufacturers call these “hallucinations” to try and humanize AI. They are in fact just bad pattern matching.
Now if you are an AI researcher and are working at one of these companies and know more about building LLMs than I do, I apologize. But if you’re just giving advice because you read a few articles on how AI is going to make education obsolete, your prognostication might not turn out, and I would advise other people reading this thread not to give up on their dreams waiting to see what AI does over the next few years.
Surprisingly, corporations lie about how far they’re going to be “any day now”, “next quarter”, “next year”, because they’re in the business of creating hype for their products and making money.
I hear you, and I don’t want to squash any dreams. I wholeheartedly encourage people to make games if that is there passion. I only meant to caution against investing a lot of time as a career path, because I don’t think that will be relevant. But like I said, if it’s just fun to make games, by all means go for it.
RE: AI is not that great and it will be a while until it’s all that useful
I agree the AI tools today can feel a bit disappointing in certain regards, but what you see today is just the tip of the iceberg. I think a better way to evaluate where it’s all heading is to look at the rate of progress rather than assessing the quality of individual tools.
In 2021 LLMs were nothing special.
In 2023 they took the world by storm with their general conversational and problem-solving abilities.
In 2024 it became trivial to produce pretty amazing images / artwork and coding AIs became mainstream, vastly outperforming experts in small context situations.
In 2025 it became trivial to produce often strange but frankly still amazing videos (still a WIP for sure), given how fast it happens and how long it would take a human to do something similar.
Even if you know nothing about AI other than what products you see available, the rate of progress is remarkable.
I am an AI engineer. What the average person isn’t really thinking about is how they scale. LLMs like Claude and ChatGPT think 50x faster than humans, have access to vast amounts of information at their fingertips (so to speak), they never tire, never take breaks, and they can communicate basically instantly with one another. Imagine putting 300,000 copies of them together on a supercomputer and tasking them with developing the next AI algorithms. This is why the growth is going to be exponential.
Even if you don’t believe they are very intelligent now, the next generation will be smarter, and then those 300,000 will all be smarter too, and then with their newfound intelligence they’ll make an even smarter AI even faster, and that next even more intelligent AI will make the next even more intelligent AI even faster, and so on and so forth. We are at just the beginning of this, but in a few years we’ll see an intelligence explosion where they’ll just get insanely intelligent really fast and skyrocket past us. It is only a matter of time, and many AI researchers think that time is very soon (<5 years for most; less than 2 for some).
I’m not a doomer like these researchers but I think they’re pretty spot on with regard to what the future will look like otherwise.
Anyways, I don’t want to hijack this thread, just felt I wanted to add some clarification to my position. DM me if you want to chat more.
Yeah I get it with carrier , I rather do it for fun part of coding .
It’s certainly interesting using some AI help rather then traditional googling ,
I have tried use local LLMs , chats but none of them give consistent results unless you are in details navigate them to desired answers, this said learning redirect to learn prompting rather then coding .
Certainly AI will become more advanced, but it’s thanks to clever engineers not magical ghost in machine , but how reliable is it itself ?
What if those clever people once retire , is there next generation ready or will relay on tools created by previous gen ?
I think the best way to learn Godot is to FOLLOW a few tutorials on 2d and 3d games in Godot, then using the project you created from the tutorial, change some things, make a new level, change the art, or just some variables and see what happens.
Next, get a starter pack, maybe from Kenney, and try to make something from it, maybe a parkour map, or a simple FPS game, do that a few times, then when you feel comfortable.
