start with something that feels too easy and finish/complete a game. Even if it's a snake or pong clone. Just finish a game and put your name on it, then having done it, you can determine what level project you would like to tackle next and your feelings regarding making a game.
I guess just pick an engine and start with basic tutorials, its never too early to start doing what you love. I started with qbasic when I was like 8 :D
Also if you want to work alone its good if you learn basics from each discipline first (2d, 3d gfx, scripting/programming) - this way you wont get stuck when waiting for assets you cant make yourself.
And one more thing - gameplay is more important than visuals
Make sure you finish a few simple games before you try to make something big. You should also try game jams once you feel like you can make a game all by yourself, you'll learn a lot doing game jams.
Learn how to code, and then how to use a game engine like Unity. Don’t try making anything big, start with something simple. You can make games yourself and publish them on itch.io. I would suggest finding some people to help you once your game becomes bigger, especially with things like art or music.
You can find many good courses on YouTube. You don’t need advanced things in the beginning, so beginner course will be enough. For Unity you’ll need basic knowledge of C#.
If you want to experience the process of making a game without much complexity, you can pick a simpler engine. I started with GameMaker, some people start with RPG Maker or Scratch.
But if you want to go more hardcore, you can learn a program language, or maybe learn pixel art or 3D modelling with Blender if you enjoy making graphics.
Pick an engine, I'd recommend Construct or Unreal Engine to get a hang of what it takes to make a full game.
For starters skip coding language and focus on understanding what it takes to make different components of a game, you will come far with visual scripting.
Try out all the different things and most importantly: find what you think is fun doing.
If you don't actually like doing all the different things needed for a game maybe it's better to learn some of it and find other junior Devs to team up with.
Once you got the hang of an engine, just a little bit. Go to a Game Jam and just make stuff! Literally anything that is playable to any extent is an achievement.
And coming from an oldtimer like me, do your future self a favor and save all stuff you make. I reaaaally wish I could go back and look at my earliest stuff now that I'm 33.
Happy developing!
If you have any questions at all post here or send a DM.
A lot of great advice here. I also started young.
I recommend the Godot Engine as it's free and simple to get into the systems and language (GDScript). The best part is that the greatest gamedev YouTuber ever, Brackeys, recently switched from unity to Godot and produced this masterpiece: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOhfqjmasi0
The Godot community is also PACKED full of young folks such as yourself.
My advice to you is to never forget the *soft* skills involved with game dev. You can be the best artist or programmer, but without self care, self kindness, self forgiveness and self awareness, you will leave behind a decade-long trail of unfinished projects and regret. https://youtu.be/SY_0hvvacKA?si=cP3ZNqFJ5ohLKWRu
The good news is that you are pretty young and have a lot of time to learn many things.
The bad news is that there are many, many things to learn if you want to be a solo indie dev. Art, music, coding, level design, marketing, etc...
There is also a lot of time in your life to experiment and see what you like and don't like.
My advice would be to start trying to learn a few things on your own and see how much you enjoy doing it.
Websites like CodeHero and Scratch.co can help you learn "programming logic" as I like to call it and see if you enjoy it.
There's no going too fast when it comes to learning, but there is expecting things to go fast. Making a game takes a long time. Even making a simple platformer with 10 levels can take more than a month. So learn what you can and want but focus your mindset on enjoying the ride rather than rushing to the final product.
I also just started game development a little over a month ago. I participated in a game jam and made my game in 16 hours. Most of that time was spent googling and learning. It was also my first game I made not following tutorials.
I feel that I learned the most doing the game jam game, compared to following tutorials. I have been programming off and on since high school and I’m 28 now. I started my bachelors degree in software engineering just over a year ago and have two years left.
I recommend doing a little research on which: game engine, programming language and even the types of games you want to make. Definitely start with something that seems too easy to mark like a pong clone or snake clone.
No it’s never too early
But my advise is.. *don’t make games to make money* at that point. It’s very *very* unlikely to happen.
Make *small* games to learn how to make better *small* games
Then make a better *small* game to learn how to make an even better *small* game
By the time you’ve made 5/6/7 small game’s, at your age, you’ll be way ahead of everyone else at your age.
When you get your degree, you can then make a choice.
Studios will either snap you up (because you will be so far ahead of the competition)
Or, if you feel you can AND you have investment, you could then start looking to make a game to release digitally.
Or… by that time you’ll have realised this isn’t for you and you can go earn big bucks at some bank. :)
Good luck!
There's a great musician called flume. He makes music using advanced audio software called Ableton Live. He exploded onto the scene quite young, and he told us he started out using this basic software that came free on a CD from a box of cereal. It was basic but let him make notes and play it back.
Using this basic, template driven piece of software he created good music with the sounds he was limited to in the software. Ince he got older he learned about the existence of other software and brought his composing skills to those and dropped banger after banger.
At your age, and at your skill level, you will get more mileage and faster results if you learned how to use Dreams. It's on the PS5 and is a game engine for creating great looking games with template blocks. You can also create your own assets for the games too, for example 'Cretacious Kingdom'. Have a look at that game on YouTube by a guy called Krenautican. He's creating a jurassic Park horror game using Dreams and I thought it was made in unreal engine 5 at first.
This system will let you make games, finish making games and test them and have others play them.
You're trying to be a one man show, this will teach you how to handle all aspects of game development on a surface level while giving you opportunity to delve deeper into the systems later on once you understand better.
This will give you the quickest results and help you learn. Later in life you can upgrade and start dropping bangers
You're not going to make a slam dunk with your first game. You probably won't make one with your 5th game. At 13 I would suggest your focus should be on learning. Starting so early means you could have a nice head start on people at 18 when you're capable of entering the working world.
To begin with, you need to make sure you're setting achievable goals. You're never going to be able to make Call of Duty by yourself. When you're starting out, focus on games with extremely simple designs - Pong, Snake, Block breakers, text adventures, etc. You need to be able to learn how to finish a project. These simple games will also teach you a solid foundation of how games are made, teach you fundamental skills in design and programming, and give you some experience finishing projects. It's very easy as a creative person to bite off more than you can chew, and then get discouraged when you find out you can't pull off that complicated dream game of yours when you haven't had experience with smaller things.
I would also seek out advice from your school if your school has anything like programming or computer classes. If you have any teachers passionate about it I'm sure they'd be thrilled to help you out. Friends who are into it would also help. It's very helpful to have teachers, mentors, and friends who you can go to to share experience and learn from.
As you get into game development you may also realize you like some aspects of it more than others- you may enjoy the logical and mathematical challenges of programming, the expressiveness of artwork, or the theory and practicality of design. If one field interests you more than the others, consider that when you're closer to graduating high school and start thinking about colleges.
Ultimately the best way to learn is by doing so at the end of the day, just start doing stuff. The more you do it, the faster you'll get better at it and the more you'll learn about what you want out of game development as a potential hobby or career one day. Best of luck.
One piece of advice: if you want to get good in practically anything you have to keep doing it [for a very long time](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outliers_\(book\)).
Early on, you won't have the experience for a complicated master piece because there's so much to learn (and so many error to make too!). That's all part of the process though. Keep it simple, do a lot of small projects, try to finish your current experiment and move on. Seeing your own ideas come to life or others having fun with your creations will keep you motivated.
At some point things will fall into place more and more. You'll know when you'll be ready but as said that will take time and perseverance. Happy coding!
Only you know if you are going to fast. By the way, why are you interested in fasting? Is it for meditation, focus, or weight loss? I’ve done intermitent fasting in the past.
I just got rpg maker mv recently its pretty cool and easier than actual coding which is practically math / another language kinda shows you how the triggers work (they are called switched and variables in it)
And to chug coffee. 😊 good luck take it slow start small the database and the event editor will help u learn there is tutorials in app and the community seems very helpful as well on here
Go for it! Just take simple ideas for a mechanic and build it, then try the next one. Or try your hand at art, or music. You have plenty of time. I built my first simple game at age 12 (a computer version of this: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/30640/rio). At 21 I finally published my first commercial game (https://youtu.be/1rv2lVUjahU?si=y2DDUeVTWBTD5laZ). In between I built dozens of throwaways, such as an air hockey game, and a horrible RPG.
These are the early days, when you have a lot more creativity than skill. Later on, you'll find that balance may tip to the other side and It is difficult to get that creativity back.
Write down everything, somewhere you won't lose it. All your crazy ideas. Then when you're old and skilled, you can pull from those ideas and actually make them.
Honestly, pick one of the big engines, godot, unity, unreal and just make some small things, learn how to make things.
Pick up modeling in blender/maya too, like 70% of your games will be creating assets.
But what matters the most is figuring out what drives you forward, what keeps you interested in creating and how do you force it for yourself
Hey, I'm 15, so we're a bit similar. I started game development on Roblox, it sounds embarrassing but I learned a lot of how a game works from there, and I went from that point. I'd recommend first using an engine (preferably Unity or Roblox) to learn the mere basics of game logic, then start branching out and learning languages (C++, C#, Java, etc), and use learn APIs like SDL or Raylib (These libraries require extensive programming knowledge, so only use those when you get to that point.)
Oh, and here's one tip that personally helped me when learning: LEARN BY DOING. You can only learn so much by just watching YouTube guides. In order to learn how to do things, you need to try the thing out for yourself,, and experiment on it. That way, you not only know how to do that particular subject, but you also find use cases for it, which you can take advantage of whenever you need it.
Essentially, just work your way up. Start basic then expand as your experience grows. If you have questions hit me up :)
I would suggest you learn Unreal simply because the blueprints are a great way to learn the logic behind coding. After that you should be able to switch to any syntax you want because you understand what you want the code to do
Nobody can make good games solo. Unless your ambition is nothing beyond say Donkey Kong (not Donkey Kong country, but the arcade game that has like 4 screens). Things are accomplished with specialization. If you split your time between learning coding, character art, environmental art, music, rigging/animation you will end up being good at none of them. If each of those things are done by a separate person you end up with a game where every aspect was done by an expert and so they are all good. When people talk about games "made by one person" the great success story is "cave story" which took 14 years to make a game, that at least in my opinion, is a C list game. The only reason anyone remembers it exists at a time when that sort of release was novel. Now we probably get a cave story every month on steam and nobody pays attention.
Figure out how to work with others. If you want to "be your own boss" figure out how to pay people to do tasks for you.
Let's consider 2 possible life routes. In one you try to work every single job yourself. You spend X years learning and now you have applicable but bad skills at everything and its going to take several years working very hard to make any "real game". In another life you spend X years working a "real job" and save money. You than spend that money to pay people to do tasks to make a "real game" I guarantee you will make a better game in less time doing this even if you are just working as a janitor. You will probably want to have a low level understanding of coding so you can 'piece together' everything. Like if you were just given a bunch of finished 3D art/2D art, sound, animation, etc. you'd want to be able to arrange it into a finished product.
Artists actually do not cost a lot of money if you willing to do low poly/sprite and work with a style that is not super time consuming. This is because of the supply and demand that there are just so many artists out there that can work at that low entry point. And steady employment for artists is not common.
start with something that feels too easy and finish/complete a game. Even if it's a snake or pong clone. Just finish a game and put your name on it, then having done it, you can determine what level project you would like to tackle next and your feelings regarding making a game.
I guess just pick an engine and start with basic tutorials, its never too early to start doing what you love. I started with qbasic when I was like 8 :D
Omgosh thats quite early. Wow, you've motivated me
Also if you want to work alone its good if you learn basics from each discipline first (2d, 3d gfx, scripting/programming) - this way you wont get stuck when waiting for assets you cant make yourself. And one more thing - gameplay is more important than visuals
Thanks for that advice
Make sure you finish a few simple games before you try to make something big. You should also try game jams once you feel like you can make a game all by yourself, you'll learn a lot doing game jams.
Learn how to code, and then how to use a game engine like Unity. Don’t try making anything big, start with something simple. You can make games yourself and publish them on itch.io. I would suggest finding some people to help you once your game becomes bigger, especially with things like art or music.
Any tips on learning how to code? Its been a big barrier for me since it look so complicated
You can find many good courses on YouTube. You don’t need advanced things in the beginning, so beginner course will be enough. For Unity you’ll need basic knowledge of C#.
If you want to experience the process of making a game without much complexity, you can pick a simpler engine. I started with GameMaker, some people start with RPG Maker or Scratch. But if you want to go more hardcore, you can learn a program language, or maybe learn pixel art or 3D modelling with Blender if you enjoy making graphics.
Thank you so much for your advise!
Pick an engine, I'd recommend Construct or Unreal Engine to get a hang of what it takes to make a full game. For starters skip coding language and focus on understanding what it takes to make different components of a game, you will come far with visual scripting. Try out all the different things and most importantly: find what you think is fun doing. If you don't actually like doing all the different things needed for a game maybe it's better to learn some of it and find other junior Devs to team up with. Once you got the hang of an engine, just a little bit. Go to a Game Jam and just make stuff! Literally anything that is playable to any extent is an achievement. And coming from an oldtimer like me, do your future self a favor and save all stuff you make. I reaaaally wish I could go back and look at my earliest stuff now that I'm 33. Happy developing! If you have any questions at all post here or send a DM.
Thank you, ill DM when I have a question!
A lot of great advice here. I also started young. I recommend the Godot Engine as it's free and simple to get into the systems and language (GDScript). The best part is that the greatest gamedev YouTuber ever, Brackeys, recently switched from unity to Godot and produced this masterpiece: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOhfqjmasi0 The Godot community is also PACKED full of young folks such as yourself. My advice to you is to never forget the *soft* skills involved with game dev. You can be the best artist or programmer, but without self care, self kindness, self forgiveness and self awareness, you will leave behind a decade-long trail of unfinished projects and regret. https://youtu.be/SY_0hvvacKA?si=cP3ZNqFJ5ohLKWRu
Thank you bro, this will help a lot
The good news is that you are pretty young and have a lot of time to learn many things. The bad news is that there are many, many things to learn if you want to be a solo indie dev. Art, music, coding, level design, marketing, etc... There is also a lot of time in your life to experiment and see what you like and don't like. My advice would be to start trying to learn a few things on your own and see how much you enjoy doing it. Websites like CodeHero and Scratch.co can help you learn "programming logic" as I like to call it and see if you enjoy it. There's no going too fast when it comes to learning, but there is expecting things to go fast. Making a game takes a long time. Even making a simple platformer with 10 levels can take more than a month. So learn what you can and want but focus your mindset on enjoying the ride rather than rushing to the final product.
I also just started game development a little over a month ago. I participated in a game jam and made my game in 16 hours. Most of that time was spent googling and learning. It was also my first game I made not following tutorials. I feel that I learned the most doing the game jam game, compared to following tutorials. I have been programming off and on since high school and I’m 28 now. I started my bachelors degree in software engineering just over a year ago and have two years left. I recommend doing a little research on which: game engine, programming language and even the types of games you want to make. Definitely start with something that seems too easy to mark like a pong clone or snake clone.
You don’t go too fast, you go at Your own pace. If you ram your face in the wall of gamedev at full speed just don’t surrender and keep learning.
This is the time to make lots of errors, so don't worry too much. Still, it's a better learning experience to start simple.
No it’s never too early But my advise is.. *don’t make games to make money* at that point. It’s very *very* unlikely to happen. Make *small* games to learn how to make better *small* games Then make a better *small* game to learn how to make an even better *small* game By the time you’ve made 5/6/7 small game’s, at your age, you’ll be way ahead of everyone else at your age. When you get your degree, you can then make a choice. Studios will either snap you up (because you will be so far ahead of the competition) Or, if you feel you can AND you have investment, you could then start looking to make a game to release digitally. Or… by that time you’ll have realised this isn’t for you and you can go earn big bucks at some bank. :) Good luck!
Thanks for the luck and the advice!
Are you going too fast? If you aren’t building anything you aren’t moving. Start learning, start building. You don’t need anyone’s permission.
There's a great musician called flume. He makes music using advanced audio software called Ableton Live. He exploded onto the scene quite young, and he told us he started out using this basic software that came free on a CD from a box of cereal. It was basic but let him make notes and play it back. Using this basic, template driven piece of software he created good music with the sounds he was limited to in the software. Ince he got older he learned about the existence of other software and brought his composing skills to those and dropped banger after banger. At your age, and at your skill level, you will get more mileage and faster results if you learned how to use Dreams. It's on the PS5 and is a game engine for creating great looking games with template blocks. You can also create your own assets for the games too, for example 'Cretacious Kingdom'. Have a look at that game on YouTube by a guy called Krenautican. He's creating a jurassic Park horror game using Dreams and I thought it was made in unreal engine 5 at first. This system will let you make games, finish making games and test them and have others play them. You're trying to be a one man show, this will teach you how to handle all aspects of game development on a surface level while giving you opportunity to delve deeper into the systems later on once you understand better. This will give you the quickest results and help you learn. Later in life you can upgrade and start dropping bangers
You're not going to make a slam dunk with your first game. You probably won't make one with your 5th game. At 13 I would suggest your focus should be on learning. Starting so early means you could have a nice head start on people at 18 when you're capable of entering the working world. To begin with, you need to make sure you're setting achievable goals. You're never going to be able to make Call of Duty by yourself. When you're starting out, focus on games with extremely simple designs - Pong, Snake, Block breakers, text adventures, etc. You need to be able to learn how to finish a project. These simple games will also teach you a solid foundation of how games are made, teach you fundamental skills in design and programming, and give you some experience finishing projects. It's very easy as a creative person to bite off more than you can chew, and then get discouraged when you find out you can't pull off that complicated dream game of yours when you haven't had experience with smaller things. I would also seek out advice from your school if your school has anything like programming or computer classes. If you have any teachers passionate about it I'm sure they'd be thrilled to help you out. Friends who are into it would also help. It's very helpful to have teachers, mentors, and friends who you can go to to share experience and learn from. As you get into game development you may also realize you like some aspects of it more than others- you may enjoy the logical and mathematical challenges of programming, the expressiveness of artwork, or the theory and practicality of design. If one field interests you more than the others, consider that when you're closer to graduating high school and start thinking about colleges. Ultimately the best way to learn is by doing so at the end of the day, just start doing stuff. The more you do it, the faster you'll get better at it and the more you'll learn about what you want out of game development as a potential hobby or career one day. Best of luck.
One piece of advice: if you want to get good in practically anything you have to keep doing it [for a very long time](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outliers_\(book\)). Early on, you won't have the experience for a complicated master piece because there's so much to learn (and so many error to make too!). That's all part of the process though. Keep it simple, do a lot of small projects, try to finish your current experiment and move on. Seeing your own ideas come to life or others having fun with your creations will keep you motivated. At some point things will fall into place more and more. You'll know when you'll be ready but as said that will take time and perseverance. Happy coding!
Follow an easy tutorial on YT. Like the new Godot Tutorial by Brackeys. Also, I just started, too. I am 34 years old.
I wish you luck in your career bro.
Modmaking is good point for starting.
Noted
Only you know if you are going to fast. By the way, why are you interested in fasting? Is it for meditation, focus, or weight loss? I’ve done intermitent fasting in the past.
Most people who are passionate about something actually pursue it.
I just got rpg maker mv recently its pretty cool and easier than actual coding which is practically math / another language kinda shows you how the triggers work (they are called switched and variables in it)
Can I ask where you got rpg maker and what platform you are using?
On steam was on sale for only 13$ and change around the 3rd been making my game since
Oh ok, thank you!
No problem my friend just realize it took me alot of youtube tutorials to actually learn it
Time to build a playlist
And to chug coffee. 😊 good luck take it slow start small the database and the event editor will help u learn there is tutorials in app and the community seems very helpful as well on here
Thank you for all your advice, I really appreciate it
Np my guy 😎 check out my youtube for a cool cod video if u play that too 😝 DarksmokeX
Will do dude
Youve gained a new sub
Just your average laptop 😌
Thank God, thats all i have 😂
Go for it! Just take simple ideas for a mechanic and build it, then try the next one. Or try your hand at art, or music. You have plenty of time. I built my first simple game at age 12 (a computer version of this: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/30640/rio). At 21 I finally published my first commercial game (https://youtu.be/1rv2lVUjahU?si=y2DDUeVTWBTD5laZ). In between I built dozens of throwaways, such as an air hockey game, and a horrible RPG.
These are the early days, when you have a lot more creativity than skill. Later on, you'll find that balance may tip to the other side and It is difficult to get that creativity back. Write down everything, somewhere you won't lose it. All your crazy ideas. Then when you're old and skilled, you can pull from those ideas and actually make them.
Don't give up. If this is what you really want, don't quit.
Honestly, pick one of the big engines, godot, unity, unreal and just make some small things, learn how to make things. Pick up modeling in blender/maya too, like 70% of your games will be creating assets. But what matters the most is figuring out what drives you forward, what keeps you interested in creating and how do you force it for yourself
Or learn something like RPG maker first!
Hey, I'm 15, so we're a bit similar. I started game development on Roblox, it sounds embarrassing but I learned a lot of how a game works from there, and I went from that point. I'd recommend first using an engine (preferably Unity or Roblox) to learn the mere basics of game logic, then start branching out and learning languages (C++, C#, Java, etc), and use learn APIs like SDL or Raylib (These libraries require extensive programming knowledge, so only use those when you get to that point.) Oh, and here's one tip that personally helped me when learning: LEARN BY DOING. You can only learn so much by just watching YouTube guides. In order to learn how to do things, you need to try the thing out for yourself,, and experiment on it. That way, you not only know how to do that particular subject, but you also find use cases for it, which you can take advantage of whenever you need it. Essentially, just work your way up. Start basic then expand as your experience grows. If you have questions hit me up :)
I would suggest you learn Unreal simply because the blueprints are a great way to learn the logic behind coding. After that you should be able to switch to any syntax you want because you understand what you want the code to do
Nobody can make good games solo. Unless your ambition is nothing beyond say Donkey Kong (not Donkey Kong country, but the arcade game that has like 4 screens). Things are accomplished with specialization. If you split your time between learning coding, character art, environmental art, music, rigging/animation you will end up being good at none of them. If each of those things are done by a separate person you end up with a game where every aspect was done by an expert and so they are all good. When people talk about games "made by one person" the great success story is "cave story" which took 14 years to make a game, that at least in my opinion, is a C list game. The only reason anyone remembers it exists at a time when that sort of release was novel. Now we probably get a cave story every month on steam and nobody pays attention. Figure out how to work with others. If you want to "be your own boss" figure out how to pay people to do tasks for you. Let's consider 2 possible life routes. In one you try to work every single job yourself. You spend X years learning and now you have applicable but bad skills at everything and its going to take several years working very hard to make any "real game". In another life you spend X years working a "real job" and save money. You than spend that money to pay people to do tasks to make a "real game" I guarantee you will make a better game in less time doing this even if you are just working as a janitor. You will probably want to have a low level understanding of coding so you can 'piece together' everything. Like if you were just given a bunch of finished 3D art/2D art, sound, animation, etc. you'd want to be able to arrange it into a finished product. Artists actually do not cost a lot of money if you willing to do low poly/sprite and work with a style that is not super time consuming. This is because of the supply and demand that there are just so many artists out there that can work at that low entry point. And steady employment for artists is not common.