Learning to Develop Games: Am I writing reviews of online courses now?

[zorealis]

As I've mentioned before, one of my interests is developing video games. I have attempted to write games since I was a teenager (I am now middle-aged), but I have struggled to get very far into the development process and ultimately walk away. So here's an update on how things have been going this time.

More details about learning game development

I've been taking this online course. (I'm not getting paid to suggest this course, it has just really been working out for me.) The course itself is structured as the development of several different games to learn ways to tackle different parts of programming games. The process is partly the instructor talking through some of the code as he writes it and partly as challenges for me to come up with the solution on my own (he provides a walkthrough of the solution so you can check your work). I've found this course is really working well for me and I'm happy to report that I recently finished the first game, a clone of Flappy Bird! While this obviously isn't a game of my own creation, this is so much farther than I've gotten in game development in a long time.

Encouraged by my progress so far, I've decided to look into a few more online courses in a sort of choose-your-own-curriculum story. I've just started a course on making pixel art, but have only done the first lesson so don't have a lot of opinions on how well that course is working for me yet. I'm also looking into courses on video game music development (another area I have tried getting into sporadically). If either (or both!) of those courses go well, I might post some of my practice pieces here.

Comments

[zorealis]

I am always impressed with people that can just teach themselves! I hear you on the downsides though. For me, I usually need an externally imposed structure for awhile until I see the basic logic of "how to engage with subject X." (Even if I'm already familiar with closely related subject Y!) Once that clicks for me, then I can usually figure the rest out on my own.