Like the title says. I don't know how to program or what even goes into making a game. Does anybody have a good guide, study class, or even videos that can teach me how. Also good programs to use like unity or unreal or whatever makes vidya games tick.
As as someone with quite good skills in programming (doing my masters in cs atm), and who has spent probably thousands of hours at this point making games as a hobby, I feel like I am fairly qualified to help you out!
First off, I don’t mean to discourage you or scare you, but video game development is REALLY hard. I’ve worked on quite complex things in terms of code, but video games are unique in the sheer breadth of skills you need to accomplish almost anything. All this is to say think carefully about what the scope of your project is. Is your dream to make a janky tetris clone just for fun? Yeah, that’s 100% doable from your starting position. Are you looking to make a relaxing minimal puzzle game to play on the bus? Yeah, sounds good!
However, once we start talking about ”I have a great idea for a roguelite thats sort of like a mix of Noita and Slay the Spire” you're entering the realm of “maybe doable if you quit your job and take a couple semesters worth of programming classes”, and this is assuming you can either to art + sound yourself, or have someone committed and willing to do it for you. That last part is important so I'll repeat: You can be the best programmer or the best artist to ever do it, but your game will still only be as strong as your weakest link unless you're lucky and the nature of your game allows for shitty (or almost no) artistic effort, or is extremely simple in terms of code complexity (narrative games tend to be more forgiving here)
I have more to say but I’ll stop here for now. Good luck!
I've been knocking an idea around in my head, I have a feeling it would be doable with like unity store assets or something.
It's basically a 3v3 shooter where you don't control your guns, you just have two little shoulder cannons. One cannon that gradually and simultaneously plink plink plinks all enemies in a 360 degree line of sight. You also have a shoulder cannon that heals any ally at about half that rate. Damage rate could go up with closer range. And there probably needs to be a mechanic to prevent 3 guys from just walking around holding hands, like you take splash damage from your allies getting hit.
There's a big UI display showing how many allies and enemies are in your LoS. There are lots of obstacles to jump around, and hopefully the movement is fun because the shooting obviously isn't fun. I know that good movement is extremely hard though, but it wouldn't be necessary to have an MVP.
The idea is to sort of train people or demonstrate to people how to position in an FPS. It just makes it literally definitionally impossible to leap after an enemy behind cover and go have alonetime with them where your allies can't see either of you. People really really really do not understand why this is a bad idea in other shooters.
-- I've also for quite a while wanted to make an anti-game that is essentially a fighting game except 0 complexity, you pick any one of 4 regular-looking people from a character select screen, and you can walk forward, back, and punch, but your enemy is a 17 foot demon who immediately one-shots you literally no matter what you do, and then it ends.
Haha that sounds fun! FPS controls are really tough unless you're good with math (head bobbing, relative rotations, etc need a fair amount of math), but the rest sounds fine-ish. I have no experience with multiplayer but I’ve heard it’s really tough. Splitscreen is ok if you take some time to ensure that the tech side of things doesnt depend on the player being “unique” (this happens quite frequently in games otherwise)
Ahh, good to know, maybe that type of game would be best created as a mod of some other multiplayer FPS, just so the networking stuff doesnt need to be touched
I've definitely played some indie games where it'll be like "whoops, two players on the same router? We haven't figured that out yet, go download Hamachi"
There's a free online book, Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python, which is a gentle introduction to programming. It starts with much simpler games than engine tutorials do, in a very intuitive language and I might start there to see if there's real interest or aptitude before moving on to an engine (Godot looks cool).
I've not used it, but Godot looks fun and approachable and iirc it's open source
Here's a Godot lesson playlist I liked https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9FzW-m48fn2SlrW0KoLT4n5egNdX-W9a&si=MDggIR6prZV_hIXO
in addition to coding, you should also think critically about mechanics and stuff. doesn't matter how well you can code race cars if you don't know what makes a fun track.
some games have robust modding tools, something like starcraft's custom scenarios or mario maker in your target genre would be a way to think about that stuff without having to get everything together from scratch
