Ask HN: I dream to build my own game by myself, but I'm not becoming proficient

4 points by mtempleton 6 years ago | 2 comments

I feel quite overwhelmed by the tools out there, and I want to improve my idea of the landscape and possible paths to take.

I am a teacher, but I previously worked in finance and know a little SQL and C# from that past job. That said, I don't have particular aptitude for software engineering. In fact, I'm a slow learner and overwhelmed by large amounts of information. I'm better-suited to learning concepts and problem solving. So that said, with past work wth C# and SQL, it seemed like nothing ever made much sense and a lot of engineering felt more like configuration--reading documentation or googling. This was very frustrating and unrewarding to me.

I want to learn how to do it literally to build my own game by myself--for this to be my life's work--but I feel like I'm not learning as much nor gaining the aptitude I should have from thus far doing tutorials in Python or with Unity/C#.

kls 6 years ago |

You should start with Unity, it is going to provide you with some rails so you don't go off course and there is plenty of content out there to learn from. Game development is going to be more code than configuration so you are going to have to get comfortable with that.

You may want to enroll is MIT's creating video games course. To give you a foundation of where to start and structure your learning.

https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/comparative-media-studies-writin...

Also consider changing your title, you can tell by it that you are English second language. Nothing wrong with that, but it tends to make parsing it harder for English first language readers and can cause them to move on as they may assume that you inquiry will be difficult to parse.

Something along the lines of "Ask HN: My life's dream it to build my own game, but I am having a hard time picking up game programming concepts."

mtempleton 6 years ago | |

I didn't know the title was difficult to decipher, but the reason for it sounding unnatural is that title lengths are limited on HN. But thanks for all the suggestions.