5 Things I Wish Someone Had Told Me When I Started To Learn How To Make Games Fahir Follow Nov 16, 2018 · 5 min read

When you start your journey of becoming a game developer, it’s normal that you will hit a few bricks on your way.

Some things might not be clear right away, and that can give you a feeling that you are lost, especially if you don’t have someone you could ask for guidance or advice.

This happened to me, and after 4 years of making games, I see how small things, if someone had told me, could have saved me a ton of time and headaches.

These things are simple, but it really helps a lot when you hear them from a person who had the same struggles as you.

And when you are a beginner, it’s very easy to miss them because you think that if you don’t learn a particular concept right away, then you will never learn it.

And that is not true at all.

You see there are easier and there are harder ways of learning something. I went through the harder way — doing everything on my own.

But if you want to take the easier way, then I will share with you the 5 things I wish I knew when I was starting out.

And if you follow these 5 things I guarantee that you will learn to code and make games.

Learn every day

If you truly wish to become a game developer then dedicate yourself every day to that task, and there are a lot of benefits if you do so.

You will build up a learning momentum which eventually will become a habit and even a part of you. This way you will learn faster and understand what you are learning.

Plus it will help you down the road when you start working on your games. I can’t imagine my day passing without opening the computer and typing some code out or at least review the code in my projects.

And for those who have a tight schedule, you don’t have to spend 5 hours every day, 1 hour per day is enough.

I always say it’s better to learn every day for 1 hour than to have one day where you learn for 7 hours and the other 6 days you do nothing.

2. Start implementing what you are learning right away

With this, I don’t mean start working on your master game idea that was in your head for a couple of years instead start building smaller games, or even parts of a smaller game.

It’s very easy to think that you need to learn a lot of things in order to start creating anything. I was caught up in this. But the truth is as soon as you have little knowledge you can start implementing it.

If you learned how to move a character left and right, try making him move up and down. Even if you fail, it doesn’t matter, because you will learn A LOT while trying.

Don’t wait until you learn everything to start creating smaller projects.

Which brings me to number three and that is:

3. Don’t try to learn everything right away

I see a lot of students who just started learning how to make games, and already they are asking how can they publish their game on steam, or how can they implement monetization in their game.

Don’t worry about that. You have a lot of other things to cover before you get to the point to publish and monetize your game.

Concentrate on learning the basics of creating games. After you learn that move on to the next game feature and so on.

Start building smaller projects and move on to scaling them by adding new features that you learn along the way.

4. Have patience

When learning something new, it’s totally normal that you don’t understand everything from the first attempt. Don’t try to rush things as that will only overwhelm you and eventually lead you to quit.

Learn step by step and accept from the very start that it will take a little time to figure out how everything works. But also know the more patient you are, the more things you will understand as each day passes by.

5. Don’t give up

All good things come if you don’t give up trying to achieve them.

If you try to learn for one month or two months and you still don’t understand how to make games, don’t feel bad about it, that is totally normal. Learning how to make games is a process.

Things can be difficult in the beginning, but you need to know that if you find obstacles while trying to do something good, then you are on the right path, remember that.

Game development is something that you learn if you stick with it. And for some things no matter what we try, there is one factor we just can’t beat, and that is time.

That’s why it’s really important that you don’t give up. Because time will pass by, no matter if you are learning or not, one year will pass.

Do you want to be the guy who looks back at the previous year and says: “I wish I were learning all this time now I would have the skills to create my own games.”

Or do you want to be the guy who says: “I managed to learn to code and make games in the previous year and now I can start working on my own games.”

That is up to you to decide, but if you stick with the 5 pieces of advice, I gave you then you will definitely be the second guy who managed to learn to code and make games.

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About Fahir Mehovic

I am an online instructor teaching people how to code and make games in Unity Game Engine.

I’ve been doing that for the past 4+ years, and during that time I managed to teach over 56,000 students how to code and make games.

I have also partnered with EyeQ VR to create teaching programs for high schools in the USA.

If you are a beginner and want to learn how to code and make games, you can start with my From Scratch To Game In 40 Minutes tutorial.

It’s a short tutorial that will introduce you to game development and show you how easy it is with a simple game idea and a couple of lines of code to create a cool and fun game in 40 minutes.

Just click on the link below and get started right away:

From Scratch To Game In 40 Minutes

Feel free to connect with me on my YouTube Channel where I post tutorials on a regular basis or you can contact me on my email: developer@awesometuts.com