Wondering where to start? (question)

Pabo , 9 days ago

Game dev is a very varied field, there's lots of ways to get into it and there's (almost) no bad choice as long as you put effort into it. Game development includes even things like art, sound, music, writing etc. which all are exciting in their own right (and indeed, if you want to make a game by yourself you'll have the chance to dabble in all of them), but from the way you phrased your question I'm assuming that you want to focus first on the programming(/game engine) part.

For game engines, I've heard a lot of praise for Godot, both for its good design and possibilities. For a first game engine, I'd pick one that is well documented, has a strong community and a doable learning curve, I think Godot ticks all boxes. After that, you can look around to see if another engine matches your needs better, but you'll already be familiar with the basics which are transferable.

For programming, the basic skills are again transferable between different languages of the same type; any popular imperative language should do. Lua is simple and straightforward, Python probably has the most resources for beginners, C still is the basis for a lot of the systems in use and will teach you more about computer science if you feel like it, C++ is popular for bigger projects in gamedev, the list goes on. No reason to be overwhelmed by choice though; pick any of them that seems to "click" with you and if you want to switch a few months later, you'll get up to speed fast.
Once you pick a language and have gone through the basics of it, a good game dev exercise I think is to try to make clones of existing small games. Games like Tic Tac Toe, Snake, Pong hold a surprising amount of challenges which will all come in handy when you'll start making your own (more complex) thing.

Personally I have more experience with programming than with game engines, but you could go with either of them and leave the other for later as needed. As long as you're motivated and put in effort, you'll get there :)

fenndev , 10 days ago

Unrelated, but I'd remove the question mark from your title or add [Question] to the beginning of it. Some people (myself included) might think this was advice on where to start, not asking about where you should start. Good luck on your journey!

sleepybisexual OP , 10 days ago

Oh, will do sorry :3

RiderExMachina , 10 days ago

The only wrong choice is being indecisive, so you start by picking one and watching YouTube tutorials about it.

sleepybisexual OP , 10 days ago

Yea, I'll try start with tic80 with my haha funni riscv machine

Wxnzxn , 6 days ago

Nice! Good luck and have fun!

sleepybisexual OP , 6 days ago

Uhh.

Is there a tic80 build for riscv?

The standard .deb doesn't work

Wxnzxn , 6 days ago

Oh, oops, that is of course sad :/

I'm not aware of there being a special build targeting riscv - maybe some searching around could find someone who did one? Other than that, I guess you could try compiling the source yourself - I guess that could end up being an exercise in itself.

Personally, I started developing in Godot, just fired up a tutorial two months ago and went from there, so unfortunately I am not that familiar with tic80 beyond a very superficial level :/

sleepybisexual OP , 6 days ago

I'm starting with tic80 cos this machine looks cool and I wanna use it