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Starting to learn to make games

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3 comments, last by 5droid 3 years, 6 months ago

A friend has mentioned he would like to learn to make games and it’s got me interested. He knows a bit of coding which will probably be useful, he is learning more coding for now.

I’m getting straight into it. Up to now I’ve downloaded unity and looking through the tutorials. I’ve followed one where it tells you to add few things on a Lego platform game. that was easy but didn’t really learn you to make a game. I started one roll a ball which required scripting and I didn’t understand it and wasn’t sure if it would work with me using notepad to run the script so I got it done following the tutorial and it gave me some errors meaning I couldn’t play the game to test the changes.

Now I’m trying a short 2d puzzle game but as it opens it gives me a list of error messages in console which I don’t know what to do about. I am just carrying on following the tutorial and see if I can still do the game.

  1. how can I solve the errors that appear?
  2. is unity a good game engine for beginners?
  3. am I right thinking it’s easier to stick with the same game engine rather than learning a few different ones?

I’ve not even thought about a game I want to make yet. Well I have I’ve got loads of ideas but I want to play around and learn what I can and build a game based on what I learn rather than having a specific idea and trying to do that as there mite be another idea that I find easier to do. This is why I’ve gone with unity. I’ve read unity and unreal are the 2 most popular game engines and unity is better suited to mobile games which I want to start with.

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I think you should try different engines , as you can find something that will be more convenient for you than unity…

In general, the errors will tell you roughly where the problems is, but it may be in cryptic language and sometimes hard to understand. The errors are compilations errors,. which are problems the compiler has when packaging the code. The issue is that the message it tells you might not be on the same line as the actual mistake (it may be on the previous line, or possibly something else entirely. It takes experience to understand how to decode it).

The best thing to do when starting out is copy and paste the error message into Google and hope someone else has the same problem. If you use a popular engine like Unity, chances are someone else made the same mistake and posted about it online.

Also, there are many engines out there, all with different degrees of difficulty. I found Godot to be really easy to work with and is well suited for a 2D game. In 3D, it is not as powerful as Unity, but if you are just doing 2D and starting out it's worth looking into.

@ElizabethSwong I think this is reasonable. You should start with a few easier tools.

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