My First Year of Game Dev

Hello everyone! 

My name is Aaron and I've been learning game development for just over a year now. It has been one of the best experiences of my life so far, and I plan to use this area to document my journey, give myself some structure on my progress, and upload some prototypes and projects in the future.

In this first post I just want to talk about my experiences over the last year. I don't expect anyone to read this self indulgent, rambling post about one man's disjointed study of gamedev, and the many false starts it's entailed. But hey, maybe someone can relate. I'll post some lessons and future plans at the bottom.

Beginnings

My journey started in March of 2024, when I first booted up Unity and started to play around with it. I'm not sure what prompted me to consider game dev as a hobby, but I will never forget that first day in a cafe when I managed to attach a character controller to this 2D blue square and was able to move it around the screen. I t was like creating magic, it totally blew my mind. In hindsight it baffles me that up until this point, despite being obsessed with video games and their cultural impact (my previous hobby was making some fairly amateur YouTube documentaries on games) I had never really questioned how they were made. Now, having moved this little square around, I instantly felt like this whole new world of opportunities had opened up to me.

From here I moved on to the fantastic Game Maker's Toolkit 45 minute Unity tutorial, wherein Mark guides you through making Flappy Bird from start to finish. I really think this is the single best tutorial for anyone wanting to dip their toes in game dev for the first time. It's short enough that you can bang out a functioning game in a few hours, which when you're starting out is really what you need. It obviously lacks a huge amount of context about how your game is working under the hood, but when you're dipping your toes, none of that matters.

Next, I moved on to a fully-fledged Unity course on Udemy. This course was...okay. It didn't blow my mind, and I found it difficult to understand why I was doing some of the coding concepts that the instructor espoused, whether they were correct or not. It was also incredibly long, and at times quite boring. Despite this, this course is what really got me familiar with Unity as a piece of software, and just conceptually how code influences what happens on the screen. Absolutely would not recommend the course to anyone, as there are definitely better, more recent, and more concise courses out there that will achieve the same thing.

I did however, make a functional space shooter game with some of the worst assets you've ever seen! So there's that. A big step up from Flappy Bird despite everything.

That last course completely burned me out and I ended up taking a few months off before I dove into my next course, Build an FPS Zombie Game From Scratch from Penny de Byl. I actually really loved this course - it brings you from start to finish building a sandbox survival horror game. The game that you eventually build is utter rubbish (even with some fine tuning I couldn't make it fun), but this was the course that really got me to that stage where I felt like I now had the knowledge to build something myself. Of course, in reality that would prove to be completely naive, but I still look back on this course with a lot of fondness. It was my first foray into 3D, and when I finished it I really wanted to set out and make my own game. 

Making My Own Games

I would like to point out that at this stage, with 2 and a bit courses under my belt and absolutely no experience of actually making a game by myself, my naivety was at an all time high. I replayed A Short Hike, which up to this point was the only game that I really knew had been development by a single person and thought "I could do that!". I mapped out the entire game design from start to finish, came up with my own concept for a similar but different game, and went about building it. I had gotten very deep into the lore of A Short Hike's development and cherry picked the aspects of it that appealed to me ("it was developed in 3 months by one guy!") and discarded the aspects that I didn't want to hear (like the fact that Adam Robinson Yu had been making games for years before he made A Short Hike, or that just because I was hand-held making baby's first survival horror game did not mean I understood how to make a video game).

It was at this point I undertook a Blender course (this excellent one from Grant Abbitt). I really enjoyed the course, but it was also the first time in this journey that I kind of went "maybe making a game is more difficult than I thought". I built out some fun assets through the course, but when I tried to build my own, it quickly became evident to me that making a game like A Short Hike from scratch would, for someone with my experience, be a multi-year endeavour. 

Nevertheless, I persisted! I developed a fleshed out concept for a sandbox bird-watching 3D adventure game (think A Short Hike, or Lil Gator Game) where you play as an anthropomorphic squirrel sent to the island to capture birds on camera. The gif below shows the model. I also had some level design set up and a functioning character controller with animations, but a compile error I can't be bothered to fix won't let me show them. 

I spent weeks trying to figure out how to rig my squirrel in blender, literally weeks. Then I had to figure out how to animate him, and get him into my scene in Unity. All of this was hugely valuable learning experience for me, but the process also made it very clear that I had bitten off far more than I could chew. I toyed with the idea of just using assets from the asset store, but the size of the project was so large that I eventually decided, after like 3 months of flailing around, that I would need to shelve this idea for the future.

Since then I have made a few more prototypes. Here's a really basic little star-gazing game. Game is probably a strong world, but the telescope aspect functions to some degree. I had played A Game About Digging a Hole and wanted to try to come up with a little concept that would trade-in the hole-digging for star-gazing. It was a faulty concept from the beginning, but this project taught me a lot about shaders, and I am low-key proud of how I got aspects of this working well.

Lessons & Future Plans

After several scattershot projects that haven't had any lift off, a few things have become clear to me over the last few months. 

• Firstly, I am nowhere near experienced enough to make some of the games that I having been dreaming up in my head. I thought I had been keeping my games to a small scope, but naivety and lack of experience really played a part here. I didn't know what I didn't know, and therefore I did not have the capacity really understand how difficult making something really is. 

• Secondly, while the courses I have done have been massively beneficial in some ways, I think many are designed to entice you with the promise of a fully functioning game at the end. This is fine, but I do think courses like that skip over foundational coding and design concepts. Like all things in life, there are no shortcuts to success in game dev, and I think I had been seeking some shortcuts, even if I hadn't been completely aware of it.

• Thirdly, game dev YouTube (like all YouTube) can be quite dangerous. It is very easy to get sucked into aspirational side of game dev, when you see solo devs making entertainment content disguised as educational. I definitely fell into the trap of feeling like YouTube was good for game dev research, when in reality it's not. It breeds negative comparisons between your work and their work, often deliberately ignores the years of work that came before successful projects, makes you feel like you can create a successful game for your first project, and rarely teaches you anything. Your time is far better spent learning fundamental concepts, learning good coding practices, and making tiny games.

• Fourthly, game dev can very easily be a completely solitary hobby, but it shouldn't be. I have definitely fallen into this trap, and starting this blog is one way I am making an effort to engage more with fellow aspiring game devs.

• Lastly, 3D is hard! Like incredibly hard. Modelling is hard, rigging is hard and frustrating, animation is hard, character controllers are hard. It has taken me a long time to come to the conclusion that starting off making games in 3D was probably a mistake on my part. So much (all?) of the fundamental concepts of game dev can be taught through making 2D games, and it is often the constraints that 2D places on us that can bring out our more creative sides. 

With that last point in mind, I have decided to bring things back to basics. I have learned a lot about game dev over the last year, but what has become most clear to me is that there is a lot I do not yet know. My goal going forward is to make a concerted effort to learn some of the more fundamental aspects before diving into making any big - that is, better coding practices, smaller game concepts (in 2D!), and learning some pixel art instead of getting bogged down in 3D. 

For the last month I have been learning pixel art, and really enjoying it. I am hoping over the next few months I'll get some small games and prototypes posted here. 

If you've read this far you are insane, but also, thank you. I would love to hear more about other peoples' experiences in their early game dev journeys. Feel free to drop a comment below and I'll be sure to respond.

Cheers.