learning to code. the journey so far (Patreon)

Hello! Seb here with the story all about how I started to learn some code after not really wanting to for a long time.

Way before we started smol dreamers we toyed with the idea of making games, but I always sort of thought I'd be music & sounds guy, and the code would be "someone else".

But I decided to bite the bullet and started toying around, following a tutorial here and there.

One thing I made and finished following a tutorial by GMTK was this little flappy bird clone, using another of my roommate's cats as the bird (Rocket, named after Rocket Raccoon since he has a similar vibe). The pipes to avoid are my roommate's dog's paws (Charger, aptly named after Dominic Toretto's car in the Fast & Furious series). you can play the game below. (I have 2 cats myself, but so far they haven't popped up in my projects. Their time will come).

https://eveningdreamer.itch.io/rocket-escape-from-chargers-paws

It's quite crude, but I had fun making it, and it sparked interest in making games again.

Over the coming months I toyed around with unity, unreal & godot, following a tutorial here and there and hoping some stuff would stick and that the coding part of it would sort of grow naturally (spoiler : it didn't). Following tutorials is all well and good but it doesn't really teach code & game development for real. It helps getting a foot in the door, and helps a lot for solving specific problems, but learning the bases first would have been way smarter. which leads to the next part :

I had some time in december/january & started learning to code in earnest. I followed the CS50 course on the harvard website for a while. It's a very good course, I should finish it at some point but I fell of off it because I got too excited to learn specific game dev stuff.

From there I moved on to trying to make a bunch of prototypes and small games on my own. By this point the whole unity debacle of 2023 had happened so I set my sights on learning Godot 4 for real. (and we decided to use as much open source software as possible for all of smol dreamers, not just the video game bits)

On too a bunch of gifs from short videos I made with my phone to share with Myu :

This took so long to figure out. I decided I wanted to learn the basics with a couple tutorials and then move on to trying to make a small game on my own and looking up specific bits of various tutorials and stringing it all together on my own. Which is a technique that seems to work quite well. (especially when you get a tutorial that says "now we're gonna do this and that" before doing it, so it gives you time to pause and try it out for yourself).

After a little space game that went nowhere, I tried a breakout clone in 3D, following a 2D tutorial. The game is even sort of playable. I threw it on to itch.io : https://eveningdreamer.itch.io/brickbreaker (there's no moving bricks though, it was a (funny) unplayable mess and laggy as hell)

Bugs are fun (all I wanted to do was open a door)

I tried a TON of different ideas, ways of playing, shaders, scripting and stuff. None of it got finished, once the mechanic worked I moved on to the next one, starting from scratch a bunch of times to get better and more familiar with the tool.

Here's some more little things that I tried. Highlights include the neat water shader and generated landscape, the resident evil style camera setup and that chess board.

I hope you enjoyed that little peek into my last couple months of learning and toying around with godot. All these gifs are from somewhere between january and early march 2024.

If you have any questions about any of these gifs or anything, feel free to ask!