It’s been a short journey, and it’s already taken some turns I didn’t expect.

When I first thought about learning about game development, my plan was to look through a few options for game engines (Unity, Godot, and GameMaker are on my short list), download one, and watch a few videos to get started and learn things one by one as I needed.

That’s been my typical way of learning new things since graduating high school (almost 13 years ago, as I’m writing this 🥶). I get really excited about something and get hyper focused in the most results-based way possible by diving right into it. I’m sure lots of people thrive in learning this way, but for me it has definitely come with it’s issues.

I found that I would quickly hit a plateau after that first burst of excitement, and as I ran into problems, I would search for videos and Reddit posts looking for people that have the exact problem in order to find a way to solve mine, and would just move on if I was the only one with the issue and couldn’t figure it out myself. I had just enough surface level knowledge to get by, but often not enough to really feel creative with it.

As I’ve been poking around videos about game dev these past few weeks, I’ve found myself getting overwhelmed over and over again with one thing that seems pretty unavoidable in game development: programming. I don’t have any experience with programming. I knew this would be something I’d need to learn, and I think I could get away with my initial plan of learning things piece by piece up to a point, but I know that would only get me so far.

Getting a solid grasp of programming and being able to think like a programmer seems crucial for me to not get frustrated and discouraged when I run into roadblocks.

As luck would have it, I was watching a GDQuest video on YouTube (a great resource if you’re looking to learn Godot) and they highly recommended taking a look at some of Harvard’s CS50 courses (Intro to Computer Science, Intro to Python, etc.) for people that don’t have much experience with programming. Thankfully these are all self-paced and available for free on edx.org. Based off of recommendation I’ve decided to start with CS50P Intro to Python and see where that takes me.

I haven’t taken a proper course on anything since high school, which I didn’t do particularly good at. I spent a lot of the time doodling in the margins of my notebooks and thinking about video games as I waited for class to end. I’ve always thought that if I were to go back to do any sort of schooling, I’d be a much better student with the curiosity of the world and the will to learn that I have now versus then. Here’s hoping 🤞.

In an ideal world I’d be able to dedicate the majority of my time going through these courses in order to get to game development as soon as possible. But in reality I’ll be hacking (pun) away at it as many evenings a week that I can stomach while working full-time, doing freelance projects, and spending time with my family.

When I have the drive to do something like this, I tend to hyper fixate and spend as much time as possible to get the results I’m looking for. But this way kind of works well with how I want to approach this year: slow, meaningful, and consistent.

I’m really proud of what building and writing this blog has accomplished for me already. It’s allowed me to slow down and properly evaluate what I want to do, and reminds me why I want to do it.