Hello! I just wanted to ask a question, and though I searched the website prior to making a topic of my own, I didn’t see this exact concept in the results nor in the latest list of new topics.
Well, I was wondering in so many words how a beginner would go about supplementing his programming studies with a team. Not a "serious" team as such, but one to learn with. Now I have seen vast swaths of 1) real coders and artists posting genuine job appeals to join or assemble a team, and 2) warnings against beginners doing the same. The reason is that if you don’t have skills in coding or art or sound, etc. you are just an “idea guy”, and an “idea guy” can’t honestly expect to attract talented, trained people for serious months and years for no monetary compensation.
That is perfectly valid. But in my case I have come to understand the limits of my own self-study in programming. I have had many false starts, from my first days in the 10th grade all the way up to my current age of …. [redacted]5. Ahem. I have failed to learn GW-BASIC way back in the day, followed by failing to learn Java, Visual Basic, Pascal, C++, Python, Ruby, and most recently C#. I actually started as a computer science major, but changed when I failed the initial C++ course tests and the prof warned us that we might never see our families again due to the nature of a programming career.
But, see, in schools students independently decide to assemble into study groups for support and motivation. It’s just common sense, and it is very psychologically encouraging. I wish I could do the same in my town or online. Unless, of course, there were a YouTube video tutorial SO beginner friendly, SO game oriented, and SO comprehensive, from ‘Hello, world’ to 2-D and 3-D finished game examples, that anyone coding along with it could become semi-pro all by themselves. Barring that kind of series (which doesn’t exist, but should!) a real-life physically present mentor is likely best. But since that doesn’t typically exist either for most of us, I feel beginners may kind of need the support at least of one another.
How then can someone like me, who tends to fail, who has read countless articles describing the harsh realities of this industry and is no vapid dreamer, and who…. still dreams of making a game project come to life anyway, find like-minded people to stop failing alone and start communally learning and practicing with?
Certainly there is this very forum, and I wish I had found it years ago. But Q&A isn’t collaboration. So is it audacious to suggest, “noobs assemble! Bring your dreams and your C# installations! Let us pin down those variable declarations and then we can for-loop a .png kitten into Bowser for fun and learning” with a beginner trial-and-error team? As opposed to being all alone, pressing and persevering with code until we have made something of ourselves to offer to "real" serious artists, programmers, and sound guys? so that then and only then we can join a team and learn to work and share with others? I’d love to work with others right now. When it’s just me I tend to feel the weight of comprehensive ignorance on my shoulders. But I mean, this wouldn’t even need to have the end goal of selling anything we made. Just a learning team. Two heads are better than one, even from square one. As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another. Etc.
I live in Japan, which is awesome, but the language barrier makes it hard to do anything with others, not to mention how hard it is to just casually meet new people in this culture. (You make your friends mainly through work and organizations. People never talk to each other on the silent trains. Even established friends don’t typically hang out for no reason.) So really, online collaboration is the best bet, unless someone can direct me towards a game-making club in Tokyo or something.
I don’t want this post to be overly long (too late), so I will just stop here. Whether it were to come from this website or not, I wish to try learning and slowly generating simple game-oriented code actively with others and not continue the lifelong start-stop spurts that have gotten me nowhere by myself.
To clarify, my level of experience is: beginner, but with a healthy dash of coding concepts and a distrust of textbooks. :P (Half kidding about the textbooks.)
Thanks for any advice you guys can give.