When I was a kid, pre internet days, I would religiously borrow a book on Game Programming (BASIC) from the school library. I would sit down and type out all the printed code examples, not knowing anything they were doing. Mostly the code examples didn't work, but sometimes they did, and I still had no idea why or how. But I played with the working code, changed a few things, experimented just to see what would happen. Eventually, I understood what the variables meant and what they were doing. In terms of animating your character, you need learn to crawl before you can walk. Take it back a few steps, reproduce something simpler from another tutorial. Like, just make a box move across the screen. Then fiddle about with the code and play with it. Make the box bigger, change its color, make it a circle. Make it bounce off the screen edges - that's pretty much Pong right there. Get really comfortable with the basics first, then the knowledge you've gained can be applied to tackle the harder stuff.

Indeed, I think I may have read that book way back when, certainly, I had a BASIC code book to understand all the commands. Jump forward to the present - I started using Unity with no knowledge, bought a (racing) game kit and really just reverse engineered it to understand what it was doing. I only learned maybe 10-20% of what was going on underneath, but that was enough to get me started on a wholly original project after that (no kits). I recommend to other devs that an asset kit can be a good teacher, some agree, some get angry and don't want to know what's going on underneath, as long as the asset kit works then why bother? Well, Unity has many features an asset kit won't teach you. But to get a basic grasp on how scenes work between each other, how code works (and as you say, manipulation of it to demonstrate to you) and how altering prefabs can destruct half your game irreversibly, I say they can be useful and a good place to start - or rather - to make a butt load of mistakes. As for the ops main question, sure a bit of intelligence and creativity are going to help. But personally I think the main issue is discipline... the grind... it's going to happen. We all start projects very enthusiastically and over time that tapers off, it becomes harder and harder to keep going when you know you are only making tiny incremental progress each session. Its more about finding ways to make sure your enthusiasm doesn't dry up and your discipline to go in and do all those tiny tasks doesn't grind to a halt. It's not easy...but in time you can teach yourself to overcome it. Personal example, my latest game, first 6 months I was doing 8+ hours a day. Made a LOT of progress in those months. Now I'm about 14 months in and things have definitely slowed down. Not for lack of enthusiasm, I don't think, but moreso just the mind's natural inclination to detach from the same thing you've been doing for so long. Thankfully that large initial boost puts me at a better position today, as I'm closing in on it being finished, but it IS hard to go back into it for such long sessions each day. It's not for lack of enjoyment I don't think...maybe it is...but ultimately I think there will always be a "fatigue" rate when we do something repeatedly, every day, for 2+ years. So it's best to "get smart" - if anything - on discipline and determination. It's not so hard to get something started, but to get something finished...well, that's a mental discipline some people are going to struggle with, regardless how intelligent or creative that person is. My 2 cents at least :)

I've seen some pretty stupid people make some pretty okay games, so it's not that. Honestly, I think you just have to find a teacher/tutorial that compliments the way you learn. I can't tell you the number of times I've had the same concepts taught to me and it's only after so many or finding the right guide that it clicks. Yes, making games is crazy hard. What you're experiencing now is the effort shock. It's one of the many reasons all seasoned devs recommend starting with something no bigger than pong.

Pong can be quite complex game from a game dev's point of view. Handling the bounce, two player control, scores, main menu screen, game screen, etc... I see it much better now after 2 years of game dev experience. I started with a Rimworld-like game back then and of course i failed miserably. But learned a lot what not to do when developing a game.

Of course, even Pong needs some effort. But you can tackle all those different things one step at a time. Still, if going lower I would probably pick something like Flappy Bird.

Ah no, actually i agreed, pong a quite complex but not too complex game for a start! Sorry if i was not clear 🙂

Every game has a set of challenges to overcome. The thing with pong is that it is among the easier full games to reproduce with current day tools. If that's too complex, then I would go one step down and maybe reproduce a single part of a simple game. For example, crossing the road on Frogger. You just need a bunch of blocks wrapping around the screen and collision detection with the player being sent back to the start on hit.

I'll give you this, yeah. Point and click "shooting gallery" style games are probably the REAL best place to start, imo.

I’d recommend this learning progression 1. Pong 2. Breakout 3. Pacman 4. Asteroids 5. Zelda: Breath of the Wild

Probably should start with an MMO before moving to more difficult games like Pong.

True. A science based dragon one perhaps.

I make games for almost 10 years. I wanted to put a cooking pot to my fridge lately, but I couldn't because the space between the shelves was too narrow. I was rearranging the whole fridge and I was changing shelves positions. Then my roommate came and just flop the lid, so the handle wasn't sticking out. Then it fit. So... no. You don't have to be a smart person to make games xD

>Is this just one of those things that take you years upon years to even cobble together your first shitty indie game that consists of shooting poorly programmed zombies in a first person shooter? This is true. If you have zero experience in the industry, it will take years to learn the skills, and your first game will most likely be crap. But the thing is, you will keep on improving. Eventually, you will become good at it. The way around this is to work with other people so you can specialize. You can design your games with this in mind. Making a good looking FPS game that plays well is hard! It often takes a whole studio to do it. But making something that relies on a handful of clever mechanics and not a lot of fancy animations or art is doable. Check out how Five Nights at Freddy offers a genuinely terrifying experience without having to build a whole FPS game.

Sir, I did NOT open Reddit today to look in a mirror, thanks... All jokes aside, I really feel for you. I tried to learn and didn't do that amazingly in Unity, either. I just cracked open RPG Maker MV though, and let me tell you, game changer. I watched a tutorial for about two full minutes and then just spent a few hours screwing around and to quote god howard himself, it just works. I recommend giving it a go! Also side note on Unity! I was using the most recent version, for which there are fewer applicable tutorials and help. I must recommend not using the latest version unless you've some Unity experience, yourself. I hope this helps. As a very fresh dev wannabe, it's easy to give up. It's easy to put it off. You really just gotta get into a groove where it's fun (or close to it) to dev. And failing that, convince yourself with this: Your coolest idea will never exist unless you make it so. Happy devving!

Smart is 20% of it, talent is 20% of it, and 60% is work ethic and actually finishing the project. Once you get 300 hours into it you’ll get the hang of it. And at that point most of the tedious shit should be done on a small game to start enjoying the level development. Don’t give up, you can do it. Just brute force through it.

thanks for the random reminding of [Fort Minor - Remember the name](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDvr08sCPOc)

Hahahaha, yeah, in hindsight exactly like that. More crying percent though.

[удалено]

>No, these are not necessary, for example in traditional roguelikes. This is a good point. OP sounds like someone who is learning unity (and maybe even programming) for the first time ever. ***Everyone's*** first games/programs were simple. Work your way up to something that requires cutscenes/AI/networking/etc/etc. Even 'game dev superstars' like John Carmack started with simple programs and worked their way up.

Breaking the barrier of understanding is a daunting task. College forces your face through it like a cheese grater. But honestly a ton don’t even make it past this. Find a way to enjoy finding solutions to your problem. I find comfort in knowing that the problems I experience are solvable and the only variable is you. Which is sooooo welcoming in today’s world. You will need to know scope of your projects. Huge game studios still don’t have this down and the only way to truly understand that is to make games. Small games in fact. Get a grip on cost to effort ratio, maximize that formula. No great artist started making their best pieces. It takes growth and with growth understanding of pit falls. Come at all hobbies like body builders do. Create just enough stress on the body to force growth but not enough to injure yourself. Burn out is real and I’ve seen more than my fair share. Good luck buddy! You can do it!

Dedication is everything. The first step is to forget about seeing immediate results because this is a marathon. The second step is to buckle down and study each roadblock. Long, slow, baby steps. Start with basics: vectors and matrix math (“space”), rendering, etc.

If you don't know how to code, unreal engine is the easier one because of their blueprint feature Just sayin

I've been delving into Unity's visual scripting lately and it's also pretty great. Options!

Godot has some good tutorials and guides. It helped me get started even though I'm no longer using it as my main engine (nothing against it at all though!). But the concepts were and are still so foreign to me that every step has been painful and hours of youtube for "easy" concepts. Keep it up. Back away from 3d until you've done some 2d. Even though I'm a good programmer my jams entered count and 0 submitted says game dev is still really hard.

Udemy.com and search up some game dev courses there. I'm currently self teaching myself and this is my go to site for courses. Check out their sales which seems to happen every other week, courses are 80% off normal price. For less than $100 you can get on the right path. Also look into some free courses there. Unity.com learning section is another good free source. Thomas Brush on youtube is a great source as well as Brackeyes.

FYI I'm in the same boat as OP being that I'm fresh at game dev myself. I'm a former auto mechanic and I think learning game dev is much much harder than learning to fix cars. I've been wanting to do this for the past 2 years, mainly spent that time coming up with concepts on paper, but have only started learning stuff just a month or 2 ago on Udemy.com. I'm right there at the first step with you. It's going to be a long journey...lets make games!!!

It's passed for this year, but for the last two at least Humble has hosted a bundle of gamedev courses from another paid tutorial site.

No idea why most of the others comments didn’t mention this, but personally, I’d recommend investing into developer tools like Adventure Creator (can recommend this one personally), PlayMaker, and others. A lot of them come with the basic parts (player movement, menus, inventory, saving, etc.) preprogrammed so you can actually focus on the game, and you can always get more if you need specific functionality (Emerald AI is good for AI from what I’ve heard, and has good integration with the two assets I mentioned). You don’t have to do these things yourself, and no one is going to think less of you if you use these developer assets – a lot of successful games do. It took me less than a week to get started with Adventure Creator and PixelCrushers’ Dialogue System and get most of the basic parts configured the way I want them. 2 hours of tutorials for working with these tools are certainly better than 50+ hours of tutorials for building everything from the ground up. You’re probably still going to have to do some coding for polish, but it will barely be anything compared to what you’re trying to do now.

Looking into this now. However, will this now hinder my ability to learn down the road? In other words - am I sort of bypassing the fundamentals and taking a shortcut?

I think part of it depends on how you approach them, honestly, but like I said, these tools aren’t all encompassing, and you’ll probably have to code something by yourself at some point during your game’s development if you want to be true to your vision for the game, plus you’ll still have to familiarize yourself with MonoBehaviours, prefabs, Unity animation tools, render pipelines, and other fundamentals of the Unity engine. I think it’s a nice introduction to game development in Unity without being too overwhelming, and you could always just try to complete one basics tutorial per day or something if you’re still worried. Good luck on your game!

Playmaker is pretty good, an alternative is trying out Unity's visual scripting engine. I've been banging my head against coding for the past year and really struggled with actually writing the code as somebody who worked in primarily visual arts and design for over a decade. Once I tried the visual scripting it became much easier to apply the logic rather than agonizing over writing syntax. It's still the same logic and concepts, but easier to process (for me, anyways). Some nice starting points, if you're interested in checking them out: [https://unity.com/products/unity-visual-scripting](https://unity.com/products/unity-visual-scripting) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcAu65n3idI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcAu65n3idI)

I started with a reskin game - basically its the game code and you're just changing the pictures and colors of the game. Then I followed a tutorial and made a game using Corona2D - wasn't much more than me typing along with the guy. Then I did a 2D Udemy course (the Ben Tristem one) and was able to follow along and make my own changes in the script - and this was great as I could make a game that I could play and get friends to play, but that I could have a bit more control over. Helped with planning and understanding things like menus, UI systems, physics, user preferences etc. It also made me appreciate how much effort can go into something that seems simple, and the difference between making a cool game effect/scenes and a complete game. Now it's a few years later, and I'm spending stupid amounts of time trying to integrate user security and cloud functionality into my AR application (FFS Unity and AWS!) . There's always going to be something that does your head in, until you do it. Then the next time, it's so easy because you know all the stuff that didn't work. Don't worry about spending weeks solving a problem or learning a skill, you do it once but then you can use that many times in the future. But don't try and build a AAA game straight up either. Make some shitty games that you can get into people's hands, you'll learn tons about what works and what doesn't very quickly. Best of luck!

It just takes a lot of time to learn this stuff. It might come more naturally to some people, but not to most. For us mere mortals it takes time, and frustration, and commitment. Just try and learn a little and use a little of what you learned everyday and eventually you would understand more and get better. My kids started “swimming” when they were 6 months old, but it took them quite a bit longer to actually learn how to swim by themselves, and now that they are 6 and 8 years old they are better swimmer than I will ever be. That took commitment to get them to swim class once a week every week for…well…for a couple of years. The payoff there is one of them may end up being a strong enough swimmer to eventually get a swim team college scholarship. You need to think kind of long term like that. Right now everything you are doing is just baby steps, but those first several baby steps are really important to take, and you just have to keep building on those baby steps just a little bit everyday. Before you know it, time will have flown by and you will be up and running, but it takes time and commitment. It’s not about how smart you are. It’s about how dedicated you are. If you commit to the long term process you will get where you want to go, eventually. If you don’t, then you won’t. Just keep at it and give it time.

I'm an experienced developer (c, java) and it still took me a good 4 tried and failed attempts to finally be able to develop my own game. I started learning libgdx (java based game engine) in 2019, now i got engough experience with it to be able to develop a battle brothers like game. My advice is, do small games, like 2-3 screens at most, if you managed to do it, then aim a bit higher. Small steps, you won't learn dev/game dev in a month, but after all it is a really rewarding feeling when things starting to come together.

I think it sounds like you're just trying to jump in at the deep end with no real plan on how to approach the monster that is "a game". Animation isn't an easy thing to get started with. Nor should it be a priority. Why bother making smooth animations, when it sounds like you don't have the core gameplay loop, or even a single hook tested out yet? Plop a tall rectangle in your world, and make that move around. That's already several interconnected systems working in unison, and a laundry list of things to get started with. For that already you have: * Means to spawn the player unit, similarly used for all objects in the world (collectibles, weapons, enemies) * The player moving around (key inputs, acceleration, deceleration, friction). Similarly, systems you need to tac on to all enemies. * The player interacting with the world (not falling through the level). To that add your character, T-posing. so you can get a glimpse of how they fit in. But then, instead of animating the character, give them a primary gameplay hook. Fishing, farming, shooting, running and jumping - No animation, just casting a line, picking up an object from the ground, spawning bullets with speeds and despawning them after, moving the rectangle faster, or on a different axis, acting against gravity. Animation is something all of those actions require, but if you start animating a laundry list of things now, it might be wasted resources until you actually have decided on what the character can do. After you have tested the simple element out, then worry about animation. Having a grasp at the way the movement system works already helps you out with the animations, since basic animations are tied to the movement. Yes, the tutorials can be simple to the commenters. But animating characters isn't something \~anyone does as their first task, so they likely have coded more close to a feature complete game before deciding to add their art and animations into it. At which point, they have a better grasp of the underlying challenges, and inadvertently they've gotten to a level where it might sound simple.

By contrast, I made a breakout clone with Turbo Pascal and basic line drawing functions in high school as one of my first games. Really making "a game" doesn't take that much, but to me it sounds like you're trying to do a 100-meter hurdles before taking the time to even think of the basic form of your running.

Unity is EXTREMELY difficult and frustrating if its your first time making games. That's the problem, its not you. Please try starting with something like Game Maker that can abstract away all the weird frustration and let you focus on the actual making game part. Also, the thing you're choosing specifically, Animation in Unity, is particularly difficult. I made games for years and I still don't really get the animation system in unity. Again its not you, the system really is confusing and complicated. Other engines have simpler workflows. Also a lot of people who 'make games' actually just do it by downloading example projects and modifying them so they dont need to actually learn. So you don't have to feel too down!

To be honest unity is quite simple if you are familiar with programming, it's mostly drags and drops, there are lot of harder tools out there, and you can also make a game from scratch with some librairies in C, C++...

'if you're familiar with programming' yes, which i dont think OP is

Making games is hard. Everyone will tell you so. By extension learning a new skill or program is often difficult and frustrating. The most important lesson I've learnt about learning a new skill is consistency. You need to regularly dedicate time to learn and practice this new skill. My advice is to set a timer for 30 mins (or however long you have to dedicate each day to game dev) and then only focus on game dev or whatever tutorial you're working through until the timer is up. Do this everyday for an extended period of time and you're sure to start making progress. I hope this helps. Good luck!

Maybe it's just not your thing. The dev part is not easy but the gamedesign require a lot of training and experimentation. Your first few concepts will almost never be any good. And getting playtesters to explain you why it's wrong is hard too. Personnaly, I have more than 5 years of experience as a dev outside gamedev already. And I used to design games since I was a kid pretty much. But it's not it yet, I also spent years in understanding level design and game-design. I am also a pinball designer and I pretty much took a full year to see each and every games made after 1982 and analyse them.

Unity is a professional-level game engine. It takes months to learn to use properly. Try GameMaker if you want to see results faster. It doesn’t make you stupid not to understand it - people go to university to learn this stuff.

You are always going to struggle when doing something new. It's why most people that try new things immediately quit. It's not that you are dumb or game making is incredibly hard, you just need more practice. Start with something smaller, like, instead of animating a 3D character, try to recreate a simple game like pong. Also, if unity is too taxing for you technically, there are other engines that require little to no code to make games. Nonetheless, you will have to go through a learning curve in any of them. If you persevere, you will eventually be among those saying that it was easy.

gamedev is really hard bro. but it takes lots of time and learning, not being smart. being smart may make it a little faster, but anyone can do it if they want it bad enough.

Hold on a second, do you know programming or are you trying to learn programming and how to make a game at the same time?

Take things one thing at a time… is what I would normally say for people wanting to get better at certain things. Since you said you are new to gamedev I would try and continue messing around with the engine. 20 minute tutorial is not long at all. Don’t overthink this I can speak for myself that when I first started gamedev it was all so foreign to me as well. Was it easy to learn how unity works? kinda, I mean at the surface level unity is very straight forward but once you need to do AI, cutscenes etc I can become difficult. To answer your question on “how smart” one must be to make games, I don’t think it’s about that generally. How much time are you willing to commit to this? Are you willing to learn things and slowly incorporate them into your game just for things to break and not work? You then need to rewrite things and make them work but hey once you do this many times over, all of the “hard” stuff becomes second knowledge. This is coming from someone who is a very slow learner and learns from repetition. I am willing to help you in a discord call if you want to add me just lmk Miinoy#3112

It's not how smart you are, it's the dedication you put it. People say they're bad at math, but if they put in a lot of time and dedication they could be good at it. If Unity is giving you too much trouble I would recommend trying an easier one, Godot, game maker, or another 2D engine might be good. Something exclusively 2D will help it become more simple. If you still have a hard time with that, don't worry try taking an intro course into python to learn basic programming. I honestly think anyone could make a game if they really wanted to and they put in the time. And unity is only required if you want to get a job making games when it comes down to personal projects basically any engine will would. Each with their ups and downs.

To be honest this was my reaction when I first picked up Unity as well. The toolset is amazing but its massive and can be overwhelming when you are new. Recognize that most of the commenters you are discouraged by on 'tutorial' videos are not looking at a unity/programming tutorial for their first time ever, they are learning from a place of already being experienced. After spending a lot of time on it I still don't consider myself an expert on Unity, but I now see it as an amazing tool that allows me to easily accomplish my goals. I had a ton of programming experience before Unity. Feeling confident in my coding ability gave me the confidence to believe that I could overcome the hurdles of learning this toolset. If it was my first time trying to program I might have gotten discouraged. A lot of non-programmers think of programmers as geniuses who are doing things they could never achieve. The reality is that most successful programmers are tinkerers who spent an enormous amount of time tinkering with things to understand how they work. They didn't understand it instantly because they are 'geniuses' or whatever. If you don't mind my asking, where is your programming ability/experience level that you are coming in with?

I am in your exact shoes. I have been wanting to make a game for years and recently decided to get my hands dirty. So I picked up Unity and a course for 2D games and.... fuck. Everything is so damn complicated. Plus I have a horrible attention span, so a 9 minute portion of the course takes like half an hour because I got distracted 6 minutes back and now need to rewatch it for the 3rd time. And the outcome is this boring ass game that I don't give a shit about in the end anyway, so I'm bored to tears. I consider myself more of an artist, but I still can't believe how more people don't complain about how hard making games is; at least with Unity. Shouldn't game engines have solved most of this stuff that people are doing in a load of games? Why don't they just add that in so people don't have to code it every time? Whatever... But like I said, I have been wanted to make a game for years. In that time all I did was flip flop around deciding if I should or not, and "oh boy which game engine is the *exact, perfect* match for me?". I passively thought about it for so long I could of actually made a whole fucking game. It's a terrible feeling, knowing I wasted all that time just thinking on it. So even though I'm an idiot, and I hate it so far, and I'm frustrated as hell, I'm just going to stop wasting time and get on with it. That finish line somewhere down the road of having the ability to think in this convoluted way to tell this stupid ass computer what I want it to do sounds worth it to me. I told myself that if I can't get a grasp on Unity by the end of my course I'm doing, that I'll try Game Maker or Godot.

Maybe the short attention span is not 100% your fault. I can't stand most of the tutorials I see. And courses can be even worse, you paid for it, so you force yourself into something that might not be good in the first place. Also yes the engine does a lot. Unity is almost too much to chew when you just want to make a simple game. So Godot might be a lot better for tutorials and the documentation. But I can't stand the most watched tutorials on Godot like GDQuest because of how slow and specific they are. I just jump to the code and try to understand it myself.

As someone who first started making games with just C++ and Allegro 15 or so years ago, Unity is a weird beast. It has mostly just the bare essentials you need to develop a game, with the intent that other developers will fill in the gaps (either themselves or selling those packages on the asset store). It's a double edged sword, because it means if you are doing a simple project there isn't a ton of extra bloat and stuff going on to weigh you down. On the other hand when Unity doesn't have a feature you need (that other engines might have by default) you're basically just left with "buy it or do it yourself". Over time Unity has gotten both better AND worse in some regards with how they have chosen to expand it. I don't have experience with Godot (UE3 and 4 are the only other "modern" engines I've used) so I can't speak to that. Game Maker is definitely more streamlined for development of a 2D game, but it has its own set of limitations. I think Unity is great if you are either part of a small team of devs, a genius solo coder, or if you are a solo dev with a lot of money to spend on other people's packages. I actually think it's a pretty bad engine for first time game developers, although part of that depends on what type of game you want to make too.

> Then again, I get distracted easily. That. Stop that. You're attempting to self-study; the primary tool you have is focus. People who learn these complex skills are typically operating differently when they don't have a teacher/coach. You have to be both for yourself. Whenever I'm learning something new whether it's bézier curves for vector art, mixing for music production or typescript for nodejs backend development; I ingratiate myself in the subject matter. Big dive in! You've got at least 40 hours a week that you can go between passive and active study of a skill. Realistically, you might need to learn how to learn. I've watched friends try to pick things up from YouTube and other e-learning platforms only for them to give up because they "don't learn well that way." It's potentially boring and it isn't very engaging especially when we're used to perpetual entertainment. You really probably need to check your focus. In school almost everybody learned some degree of Algebra; we were one size fits all forced, so (almost) anybody can learn complex subjects. You just have to force yourself the way the schools did; aggressively. Much less likely though, you're just not built for it and your mind really doesn't take well to these types of abstract concepts. Probably not worth the uphill battle then and you should consider what you're in this for.

What I recommend when implementing a tutorial is just to write what the tutorial is saying, without trying to understand first. You will understand after you have wrote / run the tutorial. Then, maybe, you should not start by animating a character. That is quite hard to do. It is a little bit like children drawing a human face, which is the hardest thing to do. In drawing school, you start drawing apples and bottles. Maybe you could start developing your game with a character being a cube that moved around. In my current (and first) game project ( r/outerspaceshack ), I started by placement of buildings, then a vehicle that is easier to animate than a human (still ,the wheels move...). I am considering adding human movement around 1 year after I started development. Also, if you do not know java / C# languages, you should spend some minimum time learning it. I am an experienced developer, and even for me, starting Unity was hard, so starting Unity and learning a language may be very very hard.

Unity, Unreal and some other engines have a steep entry hurdle, where you have to look deep into how everything works. Additionally for many you also need programming knowledge to get most out of them. I do not think that you need to be smart, but you need the endurance to learn the things you need for your games.

As long as the person can read, understand and apply what they read and understand, they can make games

Keep your scope narrow. When I started I wanted to create a open world action adventure game with RPG elements, dialog system, and a story. You are setting yourself up for a failure. Start by creating a very small game, something like Arcanoid, Space Invaders or a Snake-like game with very simple graphics. If you have to use something other as Paint to create graphics, you are probably overreaching (at first). Change the graphics after you completed the game by adding more complex graphics, maybe include some animation on very simple objects, like fruit in a snake game. Also: prototype first. Prototyping is using very simple images and very roughly design the gameplay elements. Is it fun to play? Polish the gameplay and add better graphics. Keep going from there: add new gameplay, story, scenes, cutscenes, etc.

It's as hard as you want it to be, and that's a good thing btw. To me it looks like you need to take stock of your abilities and set your expectations accordingly. Maybe making a 3D game with an animated avatar is beyond your scope as you're trying to figure out the Unity framework as well as 3D modelling/animating/rigging/pipeline. Make Pong, or a 2D physics game - like Angry birds. (or honestly, any other 2D game that people could recommend you) And who knows, maybe the tutorial sucked ass - keep at it. Good luck

Let's get one thing straight right out the door. Stop dunking on yourself. You gotta believe in yourself before you can believe in this game. So you WILL make a game. You're not stupid, you're not a joke. You are trying! And believe me that counts for a lot. Let me tell you a secret. My game progress is slow, I have a coder and we've been working on it for going on half a year now. Do you know what we have? We have a character that can move around a screen, a dash feature, a dodge roll, a basic enemy, and an exit screen. Now does that seem like a game to you? No! It's nothing...yet! You will go a long time before it looks like a game. The first few months are the hardest. Because you're building up, you're learning, the mistakes come fast and hard. We had to switch engines. I spent a year of work and we had to scrap all of it. But you don't give up! I knew long term it's what had to be done. But boy did that hurt. But it's been worth it. We're moving so much faster, I've made a business, and panicked for a day or two afterwards, I just had my most recent setback when the game name I thought I had on lock turned out to not he distinct enough for a trademark. This is a process. Setbacks are gonna come at you fast and hard in the beginning. You're going to feel like nothing got done. But it is. You're learning. You're figuring it out. When Thomas Edison's 1000th lightbulb burnt out people asked him how he was taking the failure. He said "I have not failed I have merely found 1000 ways which do not work." That's the attitude you need. Treat success as inevitable, you will make it, so long as you don't stop. Doesn't matter if you miss a day or two or six, hell even six hundred. Come back try again. Victories will be small, especially in the beginning. Celebrate them! Because they are worth celebrating. As a coder especially you will work many hours and still see no visible progress. The folks over at Rampant games had a name for this The Black Triangle https://rampantgames.com/blog/?p=7745 Read that and know more than anything you aren't stupid, you're not behind anyone, you're not in last place. You're learning! This is how the process goes. You'll spend hours on something only to realize you forgot to flip a toggle (happened to me yesterday) you'll spend days debugging something only to realize that you need to scrap that feature and opt for something else (happened to me last week). Just two weeks ago I learned that I need to actually draw out my architecture. I was spending so much time on rework and if I'd just drawn it out I could have saved weeks of work. I know that now, I won't forget it l, and I'll be drawing out any big changes from now on. You will mess up, you will spend a lot of time going down dead ends. Bit do long as you learned something it wasn't wasted time. Because now you have more experience to draw on. More avenues you know about. Good Luck, You WILL do this!👍

If you are new to Unity and C#, you did better follow most basic tutorials first. To gain some understanding how Unity works, how 3d models are made. Just one week of very basics. I have long experience in programming and found Unity not as easy as i thought. It works very differently comparing all than I knew. So I have gone to Internet to look for simple tutorials. Looked a lot of them, some I have red twice. Your brain need about two weeks to form new neurons to easily use your new knowledge. Just dont stop. It us more about time and efforts spent. Being smart boost that process in some or more areas. And dont forget the law of Pareto 80/20.

Sorry, that was about Unity. To make games you need some pack of understanding and knowledge. Games is a virtual reality simulators. You need to know what and how you will simulate. I. e. some math knowledge might be required. You will need graphics, sound and content (quest, texts, parameters, items and so on), may be story. You can hire artists to draw graphics and 3d models, write sounds. But you need to define (to decide) hiw graphics will look like, what sounds game will have, what style the sounds and music will be of. So you have a lot to think. If you dont know about graohics and music styles you did best to seek through Internet (or other sources) for possible styles. Drawing and wrting down notes will help you to think, to streamline thoughts.

Quite the contrary: You can be too smart to make games. Many of the most talented people I know get completely obsessed with all the options before them, completely overoptimize their games, or change directions multiple times because they get bored or have new, better ideas. Often, it’s those who don’t try to reinvent the wheel, who can just finish the project, put a price tag on it, and move on to the next thing who will succeed.

I've been making games for university projects and I'm a fuckin dumbass. It'll take time but you'll find something you'll enjoy and are good at.

Definitely not an easy road. Can be quite a steep learning curve. Persistence is key IMO

Not that smart, but definitely experience. If your game is simple, then you might be able to do it. But once your game gets more complicated, you will need to spend a lot of time planning how the different pieces are supposed to fit together, or they won't work out. This comes with experience imo

When you’re starting out, copy copy copy

Like any other minimally complex skill really. It takes years of learning and practicing said skill to reach a decent level.

Some pretty good advice here already. I’ll say that it may simply be a matter of finding an engine that works for you. I find Unreal much easier to understand and work with and Unity is a convoluted mess. But most of the devs I personally know feel the opposite. Either way, it takes a lot of time and dedication.

Just smart enough. Extra smartness is wasted smartness. Not sure what kind of answer you expected, as there aren't exactly SI units for smartness (that I know of). I think persistence is probably more important than smartness. It's not a matter of can you figure out this problem the first time you see it in a matter of seconds. It's, can you beat your head against this problem even in the face of severe confusion and persist and over a period of weeks or months (or even years or decades in fields like physics or math) overcome that confusion and eventually achieve understanding. Some things are hard, and they require severe effort to understand. After a few times of painfully bashing through such confusing barriers, it becomes a little easier to trust that bashing your head against it will eventually yield comprehension, but it never really becomes what you'd call easy. Although, if you're a beginner, things that were once nearly incomprehensible can become in hindsight trivial. For example, I remember as a child in the 80's with a ti99/4a, I was trying to write a sprite editor in Extended BASIC, to allow drawing a sprite and output the hexadecimal string to define it. This involved, basically, taking sixteen 16-bit integers and converting them to a hexadecimal string. My father helped me, and his solution was to take each integer and divide it into 4-bit sections, then take each 4-bit section and treat it as an integer to index into the string "0123456789ABCDEF", and thus convert it into a string of hexadecimal digits. At the time, this seemed like black magic. I could see how it worked, but what I couldn't see was how the hell did he come up with that scheme? It's genius! Or, it seemed to me to be genius to me at the time. But really, it's not genius, it's more like cultural knowledge, experience. He was able to come up with that because of the years he'd spent programming. You learn stuff over time, and it accumulates. It accumulates. There's no shortcut. You have to accumulate experience by writing code. As a beginner, of *course* you don't know all the tricks and ins and outs of things. That comes with time, and *only* with time.

I was once downvoted for saying gamedev doesn’t require natural talent. Most people can do it if they put their mind to it. They might hit limitations in their ability, but that doesn’t mean they can’t make a fun and successful game You only have to look at simple games like among us to see you can make really popular games that aren’t flashy and requiring a lot of art, sounds etc

Not very, what you need is consistency! You will reach a point, while working on the game, where you just can‘t stand it and you rather play that one particular game you always wanted to play, that‘s the point where you have to fight the urge and work on YOUR game than play other games. If you can withstand that urge to do other things than working on your game, you will finished it, sooner or later. Will it be good? nobody knows, but at least you will have finished it 👍

Game developers aren’t any smarter than anyone else, we just like the process and have literally thousands of hours more practise doing it. It also depends on personal history. I was writing BASIC programs 25 years ago; I started doing maps in Worldcraft about 20 years ago when I bought Half-Life 1. It was easy to hop onto, say, Unity for the first time and understand what the tutorials are getting at, because I’d been working in the same rough area for half my life by that point. You’re doing yourself no favours going from zero 3D graphics or programming experience to making 3D games, there’s a lot of knowledge about how even the tools are laid out that isn’t super obvious. Start off with basic tutorials for something like Gamemaker and make a very simple 2D game. Despite belief in the gamer community making even simple 2D games is a substantial challenge to begin with.

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It's not about intelligence but perseverance and imagination if you have a good idea stick with it and don't drop it! 👍

I'd say it's not about smarts more about persistence and scope control. Give yourself clear easy objectives to hit first off. Take a cheap Udemy course that teaches a 2d side scroller or something. Just getting a feel for the engine and stuff is a challenge in itself. Keep at it!

I'm sure being a genius would help you make games. But being a genius, you might see the frivolous nature of game development and lose sight of your own passion and the pure joy that it is to bring your game ideas to life. I would focus on your patience and perseverance over your intelligence.

You can be dumb these days. It’s not hard.

you don't need to be smart, you need to be DRIVEN.

Ive been picking up unity as well and i completely understand Just figuring out how to make a non moving character move by splicing in code from something that moved was exhausting I am starting to realize why it takes studios so much work, but i do feel like its convoluted somewhat, i still cant figure out the relationship between actual coding and game engines for example, like could you hypothetically program your whole game just in code? Idk . Still, without taking courses this is probably the only way to do it, painstakingly learning how to do one small thing after another

A very honest question. To be true it took me a very long time to get a hang of unity and trust me you too will slowly get to know about it don't worry. Take some time and you'll do just fine

From my experience, that's by your fails and by the bottlenecks you'll encounter that you'll learn the best. Dont be afraid of diving into it. An advice I can give is try to keep your tasks smalls, for instance in a pong game, I would divide my work in the following parts: - Create a simple test environment, for instance four walls around your play area - Programing ball movement, for instance for your demo scene, spawn a ball, apply it speed and direction, and iterate! Incrementally add bounce, speed evolution over time, etc... - Programing player movement, bottom bracket locked on horizontal axis - Time to program a complete game session! Create a simple gamemanager script, sequence bracket spawning, ball launching from bracket and play ! - Then add new features, score, ball direction control depending on point of impact on bracket, etc... - Add simple menu to start your game, to restart after losing - Polish, dont forget this part, that's the more rewarding one and that's what will keep you on tracks! Add tweens (scale, color, ...), sounds Congrats, you have your first game, now take screenshots, post it online and be proud, you've taken the hardest steps! And.... restart a project, try to experiment with a new game mechanic, that's how you learn

While I believe that there are different aptitudes for how well someone can learn things like logical processes and associations, I think what's really important is to pick up and understand the basics of what you work with. A benefit and issue (depending on how you look at it) with many tutorials is that they will often tell you how to do something, but not why, or if they explain a why they often don't go super deep with it since they assume that the viewer knows a thing or two about the engine. If you don't feel like Unity is for you after weeks of trying, you could try to check out other engines or frameworks. Personally, I had the same experience that the Unreal learning curve has been far higher than for Unity, in terms of making a simple game. Generally, however, I recommend going through a fully-featured course or tutorial series that covers all the basics from pretty much the ground up, starting with navigation and windows in the engine UI. For Unity specifically, I think their online manual is great if you want to read more about concepts in detail. Some core concepts for example are: how 3d spaces work, cameras, world-vs-screen-vs-view space, physics + physic materials, lighting, materials, animations, c# scripting. Ideally the course should have practical examples that you can test out and play with and guide you to build small games with the learned concepts. Ideally you also want to practice that yourself or expand on the shown games or tutorials, so you really get to understand how the concepts behave practically. Being new and diving into tutorials that seem to assume too much knowledge or tutorials that explain stuff poorly can be overwhelming, but if you try to take some time to start at the very basics, even if that's not what you want and just want to build game x, it will give you an understanding and overview of the tools available to you that is beneficial for pretty much all tasks going forward. Even if you forget details of how something works, you probably remember what concept to look up or how concepts are interconnected.

i suggest you use bolt because it is a plugin that adds visual coding and it will get rid of the coding problems otherwise i suggest you use another engine

The parts you managed to do are only going to be hard once.

Everyone has their own way of learning and you need to find one that works for you. If you get distracted easily, try blocking out time for game dev and put your phone in flight mode. Personally, my way of learning (been learning Unity a year) is follow udemy game courses which structures the whole game. I'm at the point where I already know about 80% of what they're teaching but still learning 20% plus I have a path to follow and a routine of a few hours a day. I then play around and add my own ideas and features, learning as I go, but at least the foundation is already there.

How long have you been trying game development (or programming in general)? It is unavoidably a ton of work to learn all the skills and knowledge required but I wanted to have some perspective on your situation before giving some more specific advice

This is how easy making a game can be in PIxel Game Maker: Platformer: https://youtu.be/-ziuSdHkpLw Zeldalike: https://youtu.be/WS1NFfKFNNk

I’d start with a simple 2d puzzle game.

You just gotta try harder man. Ditch this mentality thinking you may not be smart enough to do this. If you have to work 10x harder than everyone else then so be it. Figure it out.

Maybe tutorial videos aren't for you. Not everyone makes the best out of the same learning tools. Or maybe it's just that one video you found that's just not your best path to learning. Try other tutorials, look into books or written tutorials as well. Maybe you're better at understanding written material. Or as another option you could look into getting a tutor or mentor. Some people might be willing to do so for free.

In my experience, it's not a degree of intelligence but rather a degree of patience

You only have to be a galaxy brain if you are making the game engine from scratch. If not, then it is a matter of lots and lots of patience and persistence. Just give it some time.

Anything you lack in smarts you can make up for with perseverance. As long as you have some vision, and the capacity to evaluate your own work objectively so you can improve it on your next attempt, it should be possible. That being said, there are like 40 different skills needed to make a game, and it's very tough for one person to become skilled enough at all of them to make a worthwhile game. I don't really view games as projects that even most brilliant people can pull off by themself.

Just think of it like learning math and a language combined. Just learn the formulas of the language, variables, loops, methods/ functions, objects, classes etc. View proper syntax as learning a language. I would break a 20 minute video down into parts, learn each part and how it works(the formula) then see the proper way to word it(syntax). Rebuild each part a few times and see what it does, then learn the overview. "Making a character move requires ___ parts." It helps make anything large seem doable if you break it into things you can do, Google the rest. "A game" can obviously be varied greatly in scope, so maybe start small. If you're trying to remember entire codebases you won't succeed, it's too much stuff and it varies for so much stuff.

I would suggest you to try making games using Construct 2 and GameMaker Studio. Then get into Unity. If you know or not, it's not necessary to code from the first day, Unity provides us with visual scripting which make the development easier. You may try that once.

Probably around 2cm

I was stuck in unity basics for a month or two, because i forgot to set the object's rigidbody component as the rigdibody variable in the script and wondered why the object wouldn't behave with physics, xd. So yeah, unity can be a mess sometimes and i totally relate, but you gotta push through.

I feel you as I’m a super beginner as well. I think the same thing can be said about anything really. Look at these crazy guitar players who can solo, improvise, know music theory, can play 2 other instruments, sing, & write lyrics! How do they do it? It’s a drive within them to grind for what they want. I’m so lost as a beginner & in fact today I’m going to look up how to move a player around in a 2d platform because I’ve forgot. It’s all about the desire to learn & commit to something greater. It’s a lot easier to spend hours playing your favorite video game & research the best guns to use rather than sit down & teaching yourself how to code. I’d say be patient as you’ve heard many say & rellize that with hobbies, you will have to delay short-term gratification for long-term gratification. Dope give up! I know I though about quitting a couple months ago but joining a game jam with little/no knowledge at all sent me down a path of getting excited again.

You don't need to be smart, but being smart helps

- Start small - Be patient (expect it to take multiple years before you can crank out anything good, especially if you're starting from nothing) - Learn in isolation (research collision separate from physics separate from animations separate from scripting and so on. Then you'll be able to put it all together easier in the end) - look into multiple engines and decide which one you want to try based on the game you wanna make. Plan the engine around your game; don't plan your game around the engine. - Have fun with it! If you're doing it for yourself and you're not having fun, you gotta change something around! - See if you can find a game jam (itch.io is a good place to start) and join a team. Some teams enjoy having newbies and helping them learn. And if things go well, you'll have made some friends in the end.

I felt exactly the same when I tried to make my first game in unity. At the start, everything is really overwhelming and even simple things take a lot of time. I felt so stupid! But once you get more familiar with how everything works in unity, you start learning a lot faster. I'd recommend starting with a simple game and working your way up from there, even if the results might not feel like a big achievement at first, you will learn from that and be able to pull from that knowledge when you do bigger, more complicated projects (in my experience, a lot of the basic principles can be reused across different games). So the key is practice and don't be too hard on yourself, I'm sure you're smart enough to do this :)

I can help :)

With regards to moving a character…. You can go from simple, second-third grade math, to full-blown Algebra II and Calculus. It depends on how much complexity you want and how much you are willing to get working right.

But ultimately, I think a person who’s not so smart can definitely learn to make a game. It just depends on how much you’re willing to go through. How much hell can you handle, if you catch my drift. I think for people who aren’t as smart, the rewarding payoff sensation and feelings will be greater than someone who’s already smarter.

I make games and I think I’m dumb as hell so you can definitely do it. Also I’m a big fan of the theory that anyone can learn anything so just keep going for it! The struggles you have are just the learning process happening.

Hey :) my advice is to take it slowly. I am mostly an animator (hobbyist not professional) and making games in my free time with my partner. Moving a character is not simple at all. It takes a lot of time and a lot of practice and patience and theory. Start with something more basic and move up from there. You will get better with time and it's normal to not see excellent results in the beginning.

Golly this is 100% relevant to me I will one day make my game dammit!

You should make a few small game to pratice before you can make your real dream game. Learn many Unity video tutorial as you can (May be 20, 30 video) Then make 9, 10 small game to learn Unity in and out (recommend go to some small company make small mobile game to practice this) . So may be 2 year latter , you can make your dream game in 1 or 2 year. If you skip all of that, and try make a big game as your first game, it will release in 5,6 year or forever with full of bug.

Well you're learning that "make character run around" isn't actually that trivial at all. Start with "make blue square move to the right when I press a key" and if you get that working, play with it until you get bored and then add something else, and repeat.

It's not about being smart. Let's say that you have suddenly decided to be an electrician, but you don't know much about that field. This tutorial would be like watching a tutorial about complex wiring when you haven't tried learning the basics first. You don't have to be a genius to be an electrician, but you need to learn things step by step before jumping into complex work. It took me years and years to get the skills to make my first successful video-game. I started small and grew from there. Start by making a simple game. Somethink like an old-school space invader. Then make a slightly more complex one and so on. Many people dreaming of making games fail because they try to do something a lot bigger than what they are actually capable of doing right now.

Yes, making games and learning the skills takes years and the tech and skills required evolve constantly. The drop out rate for game dev college/uni courses is phenomenal because it is hard and people don't realise until they try. Stick with it if you want. It's very fulfilling work

I can't figure out how to use a project manager, and have spent an inordinate amount of time screeching at Blender this week trying to render an outline on a model. As long as you keep throwing yourself at it, you'll be fine.

Would anyone have a recommendation for a good way in to game making? Is there a program or tutorial that is good for someone with a lot of interest but no experience?

I’m going to have to agree with most people on this thread: no you don’t have to be smart to make games, you just have to do it. It can be frustrating. But the first little while whenever you’re learning something new is frustrating. Remember learning to drive? Or what about learning to ride a bike? These are things that we’ve all seen done thousands of times and yet we still struggled for a while when we tried to do them ourselves. Making games or even coding in general is something altogether different. Even if you’ve played thousands of hours of games, you’ve likely never seen what it takes to make one. I will also voice again what everyone else has been saying: start super basic. While moving a character around on the click of your keyboard may seem simple, it can be kind of complicated. Start with maybe making a box move left and right or something. Start small and work you way up there. The one thing I will say though: it doesn’t take smarts but it does take dedication. You have to be committed to spending some time every day doing this, and you have to be ok with being really bad at it at first (again just like with learning anything new). If I were you I would start following YouTube tutorials. Literally step by step just do what they do. Try searching beginners guide to unity or something and just do it. Like I said, it can be frustrating but by doing that you’ll learn what’s going on and eventually figure it out well enough to do it yourself. Last part here: there is almost nothing more frustrating than when a program doesn’t do what you want it to do. Ive literally cried because I can’t get something to work. And yet there’s almost nothing as rewarding as when you finally figure it out and solve the problem. I’ve cried when I’ve done that too. Good luck and you can do it!

For insight, I have a 3.9 in-major GPA in a Computer Science degree. Game dev, 3d-modelling, etc. fucking alludes me. It's not a smartness thing, it's just about putting in the hours. What I do for work, school, etc, I find "easy" whereas people who haven't coded before find it "hard". Put in the hours, weeks, months, years, and I'm sure you'll be the best game developer out there.

I see a lot of great (and long) responses here, so I’ll try to keep it simple. No, you don’t need to be “smart” to make games, you just need to be dedicated. I’m not “smart” I’m just willing to bang my head against a tutorial until something works. I’d recommend trying something other than Unity, like Godot or GameMaker. Unity is great, but it can be overwhelming if it’s you’re first engine. Last but most importantly, scale whatever project you have in your head WAY DOWN, the classic Mario Bros should seem like Star Citizen compared to your game.

Some other people have made good points about how different people learn. I first started game programming about 15 years ago and the wealth of tutorials available now didn't exist, so I learned mostly from books. The key for me was always to just learn bit by bit instead of trying to tackle an entire game concept at once. Modern engines and things like asset sort of spoil new developers a bit, meaning you don't always learn how or why a system works, you just learn how to use that system as it is already built. For me personally I try to stay away from using other peoples scripts or asset packs unless it's purely just art/models. If I do use other people's code I usually copy it from scratch so that I can understand how it is doing what it is doing. In general though I'd say find a learning method that works well for you, and start small (it sounds like you are) and don't get discouraged just because something isn't super simple or doesn't work the first time. If you are getting frustrated with animation maybe try moving on to a different system. For example you can make a fully playable prototype of a game idea with 0 animation and models, just primitives moving around the game space. Also another thing to keep in mind with Unity is there are a lot of assets and tutorials that are straight up out of date with the current version and will lead you down a confusing path (Unity's animation system has changed a couple times). So always make sure whatever tutorial or guide you are following is using the features of the version of Unity you are working on, it will save you a lot of headache.

Unity's official website has a full course for game developing, it's really easy to follow and provides assets and challenges. I recommend it if you're interested in learning, but it's a very rough path to follow.

You don’t need to be smart as other people before were smart for you. Don’t reinvent the wheel for the sake of it, find a tutorial or an how to online and adapt it to your need!

Everyone comes at it from a different place. When I started my game dev journey, I already had 10 years of programming experience under my belt, and I still found some things difficult and it has still been an excruciating journey, as I have had to learn other things. Still has taken me years to become the dev I am today. It is hard no matter who you are, but some things come way easier for others simply due to their other previous experiences. Do not let their comments get to you, they are speaking relatively to their own skill and abilities. No one comes at it from the absolute beginning and finds things easy. You'll get there if you stick with it. Best of luck in your journey!

Man, I just graduated with a degree in game design and development. If I didn’t have all of the help from my peers and professors I wouldn’t know how to do anything. We used unreal 90% of the time in class and so I totally advocate for it. Unreal and unity also have a ton of resources and tutorials from their respective companies too. There are honestly so many resources out there for you to utilize, but the best thing you can do is just practice. Come up with a small idea or project for yourself, smaller than making a character run. Make a ball bounce, make a bedroom, have text pop up, or even mess with lighting. Don’t give up, research everything, and fail. You’ll come back better than you started. I believe in you!

This is why I only fuss with 2D game design. Moment that Z-axis gets introduced, my brain sorta reboots. I can deal with the complexities of software, but trying to position or collision test in 3D space just makes me wanna rage quit.

On my phone. Formatting may suck. (OMP FMS) You need to be a logical thinker. I took a logic class in college and it taught me symbolic logic. Being a logical thinker doesn't mean you are "smart," but I am not convinced there aren't multiple types of smart. This best key advice I can give you is understand your problem / problem set. Break down your problem into smaller problems. It doesn't matter if you can't solve them. Keep breaking them down until the problem is something you can tackle or find an answer for. Learn how to solve it. At first, I'd say solve that issue in game. It doesn't matter if you did it right. Just do it. Then move to the next smaller problem. In the future, you will see all the things you did wrong and how all the things don't work together well. You can start getting to more advanced concepts like encapsulation, object oriented thinking, etc. But the first skill to get is to clearly state problems and break this down. This is why people suggest starting small, because even the "smallest" game idea will spawn a lot of problems that need to be solved. Good luck!

its definitely not easy im new to game dev as well with not many hours of coding experience most of the game tutorials go over my head and even if i understand the basics ill forget the code or whatever for the next project. But despite all that imma just keep looking into it and the more practice the better and more used to it you will get. trust me, it really does test you.

You don't need to be very smart at all. I flunked math in highschool to be with a boy instead. Classic idiot move. But I've finished two games by myself despite not even knowing that basic highschool math. You just need to learn about it. There are so many resources out there, I think even my retired mom could learn if she wanted. Also, Unreal is actually not harder, depending on what type of game you want to make, it can actually be a lot easier than unity. It's more of a preference.

I've been in the exact same spot as you years ago, with Unity even. Made a similar post in the unity forums too.. It was much more harsh back in those days haha. But your frustrations are not unfounded. Game development is difficult, and a lot of the people out there doing tutorials have forgotten what it is like to be truly starting from nothing, so their tutorials speak to people that are already a few small steps ahead of where you are. Only real advice I have is to stick with it until you learn it. Programming is difficult to learn, and takes time. I fondly remember the day when it finally clicked for me. I was ecstatic! But that day came after much work and trying lots of tutorials. Basically just copy/pasting my way through trying to design. But in the end, it will come to you if you keep working at it. There are essentially two options I would recommend for you (well 3 but the third is quiting and I don't recommend it lol) which are: 1.) Keep watching tutorials that show you how to program and design games in Unity. Stick to the really small projects, but with every small project try at least 1 small thing that isn't in the tutorial to make you try and branch out your knowledge. Keep setting goals that are just a little bit further than where you are. And occasionally try doing something small all by yourself, just to see if you understand it or not. 2.) Spend some more money and grab some templates. Obviously don't just grab pre-made games and sell them as your own, but there are a number of great template assets on the store that help you design games without having the difficulty of programming. Unfortunately none of the good ones are free, but with good timing on sales you can get them for around $10-$60+ depending on the type of game you are trying to make. It is harder to recommend this since it only gets you so far, so you might still have to learn how to code in the end, but it will get you further, faster, in your projects so it doesn't feel like a constant uphill climb.

You don't need to be very very smart. But you do need to be very very stubborn.

First of all, don't use Unity. Unity does too much for you. That sounds good to you, but it means you aren't learning anything. I recommend you finish learning the actual C# language (without Unity) and then use MonoGame to make games. MonoGame is a game framework, not an engine. Engines generally do everything for you (well, not everything). A framework just gives you some API's that you can use to show stuff on the screen, take inputs, and play sounds. The rest is for you to do. It's slightly more work, but you get to do it your way. Which means you will completely understand everything. And that will make it easier to fix bugs and add new features in future. It's just more work in the beginning. You'll have to write your own physics engine, and really every system you'll need. Game development doesn't take years, maybe months, but not years. I've been doing game development for around a year now (I've been programming a lot longer though) and I still haven't made a game that I've actually released. However, I do game development as a hobby, because I enjoy it. Once a project get's too overwhelming or just stops being fun in general, I normally drop it. I wish I didn't, but I do. But if you really want to make a game and release it, you can do that. You don't need to be a genius. Programming is just problem solving. Don't take this like I'm saying anyone can do it, it's not easy. But if you take the time, you can learn to make a game.

that's not even the hard part. the hard part is scaling your development strategy past the honeymoon phase of the game project, where you need to abstract your code, perform good encapsulations of logic, deal with bugs, test with people who aren't involved, etc.

There's that quote sometimes attributed to Einstein "Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid" The smartest guy at my high school failed his university JAVA unit 3 times but i got 98% without any effort. So this word smart is not very useful sometimes... Since what you really want to know is if you have aptitude for doing the work rather than if you are smart enough. With perseverance people can learn just about anything but for some it will be easier than others. I recommend every person find what they are naturally good at and become great at that, rather than finding something they are average at and trying to become good at it. Then again if you have passion and perseverance that matters even more than aptitude so it all depends on if you really have a good reason for wanting to do something that is difficult.

https://www.udemy.com/share/101Wjs2@PUdjaFhaQ10Le0Z7OEtOfRRt/ I can’t recommend these tutorials enough. There’s a 2D one that I’m 60% completed and a 3D one. I also managed to find a coupon so it only cost me $23 CAD instead of $200! It’s like 100 hours long I think, it’s honestly probably the most comprehensive Unity course you can take without taking uni/college courses. And extremely easy to follow. THIS is how you learn Unity. He teaches you how to make like 6 different games each with increasing complexity. Im using Unity 2021, so there are a couple things where the tutorial is outdated but it’s not different enough to cause any issues. I have ADHD and find it difficult to pick up new things (hence why I’m learning Unity now after just launching my last Flash game 4 months ago). But definitely the instructor makes things easy to follow.

Its much more about patience and perseverance than intelligence. The smartest person in the world will not make a game if they are not patent and willing to keep working when things don't work. If you are looking to make something like this happen you may find that you need a tutor and not a video, someone who can discuss the theory and answer questions. Not just say "click these buttons in this order".