I think the more salient question is: why do you care what other people are doing on their own time? Personally I don't like sour cream, but I don't get angry if a stranger orders a burrito with it.

Because it makes me feel useless when I code. It makes programming seem pointless. It makes me feel as if I've wasted the last 3 years of my life learning to program.

I think it's pretty obvious you're just starting out with programming, as all of your comments show.

And no, you didn't code anything from scratch in Java. Java is a product someone else coded for you so you could save some time, just like a game maker. The fact that you don't understand this after 20 or so replies at least shows me that you've got no clue about what you're doing.

Because it makes me feel useless when I code. It makes programming seem pointless. It makes me feel as if I've wasted the last 3 years of my life learning to program.

That sounds like you lack self-value in what you do - or that you are worried you are heading in the wrong direction to meet your goals. This is something alot of people worry about, and we discuss it and talk it over alot with others on these forums or in real life. But we don't go bashing other tools because we're worried that they might supplant us. That's like a dictator murdering anyone intelligent to prevent opposition instead of learning from the wise to build a better government.

I jokingly call these "crises of faith" with our chosen toolsets - I had one a few years back worried that I should switch from C++ to C# (I ended up sticking with C++ after considering heavily and bouncing it off someone else who wasn't even a programmer).

If I'm digging a hole with a shovel, and someone else comes along and digs one with a steam-shovel, it makes me feel rather silly getting dirty and sweaty. But it's not true that me getting sweaty and dirty somehow makes me 'more of a man' than the person who has the steam shovel. That's just a delusion. It is true that I'm doing 'more work' than the other guy, but since my goal is dig a hole and not do lots of work, that doesn't invalidate the other guy's method of digging.

If your goal is to make a small hobbyist game, then you chose the wrong tool. That's fine, your existing knowledge will let you switch tools easily, so it wasn't wasted. But if your eventual goal is making larger more detailed games, these helper tools are great, but usually don't scale well to more advanced games, so your current pursuit is the correct path. But that's fine, because their existing knowledge will let them switch tools when they are ready to scale up, so their time wasn't wasted either.

Bashing other people's successful methods because you feel you wasted your time and you are worried just doesn't make sense.

I think it's pretty obvious you're just starting out with programming, as all of your comments show.

I think this is a good point to underline: Three years is great! But even after eight years of "hardcore" C++, I still have alot to learn. Eight years still makes me a 'young programmer' to alot of people who have been programming since the 1980s or longer.

Another related point is that all the people from the 1980s who learned to adapt to the changing technology have continued to be successful and are still recognized as innovators and skilled engineers, and are using the new technology to build better things in more recent history than they have in their early history.

And no, you didn't code anything from scratch in Java. Java is a product someone else coded for you so you could save some time, just like a game maker.

Exactly. Java is a programming language designed to save time in porting applications, by making it so you have to only write the program once, and it'll run anywhere that Java is installed in.
In the older days, people had to rewrite alot of their game for every type of computer they wanted it to run on.

The fact that you don't understand this after 20 or so replies at least shows me that you've got no clue about what you're doing.

Meh, people learn through experience. It's no crime to not know something; if that's the case, then I'm more guilty than anyone here.

Terrible community here. Well, off to find a better Gamedev forum.

Try the GameMaker forums, they're usually real friendly with people wanting to learn.

That said, we've been polite and friendly, but have been disagreeing (professionally, and with facts) with you. If you consider a 'terrible community' to be polite people who disagree, I'll just warn you: Finding a community of people where everyone just agrees with you is not how you grow. People placating and Yes-manning you, or patting you on the back when you are wrong, does more to damage your growth and skill than people being rude does.

Bouncing from forum to forum until you find someplace where people tell you what you want to hear, instead of what you need to hear, you'll poison your own self-development. Maturity requires being around people who tell you you are wrong. This forum assumes you have a minimum level of maturity to accept criticism, and then grows your maturity and your knowledge by thorough and intense debate, discussion, and open (but constructive) criticism.

And if you really think this is a terrible community, then you must be new to the internet. Nobody here as openly insulted you - except by some assuming you were intentionally trolling, but they haven't shied away from correcting flawed ideas you have. To call flawed information anything other than flawed, would be to disrespect your maturity and would be a disservice to you.

You need to really know how to live with being wrong to participate in this community - otherwise, you can't grow.

The first post of this thread amuses me, and I congratulate you on having the courage to stick your neck out on the chopping block It's actually an interesting subject, not confined to the field of game development. Take woodworking for example. There's a certain old fashioned romance to crafting things with hand tools. Plus there's so much more flexibility, and it's quiet and relatively clean, and you can work in a small space. But someone with a big shop, power saws and sanders and jigs to quickly whip out a batch of 100 duplicate parts will make way more money than you. But I find jig making to be very boring, and rarely like to build the same thing twice, much less 100 times, and hate loud noise. So I build acoustic guitars almost entirely with hand tools. Because it makes me happier than having more money would.

But that's more an analogy for game development using programming libraries and licensed tools and whatever else you can find to speed things up while still accomplishing your goal. Game makers are more like buying a guitar kit, where the overall character of the finished product is pre-defined for you.

I think the more salient question is: why do you care what other people are doing on their own time? Personally I don't like sour cream, but I don't get angry if a stranger orders a burrito with it.

Because it makes me feel useless when I code. It makes programming seem pointless. It makes me feel as if I've wasted the last 3 years of my life learning to program.

This is pretty much the crux of the issue, "will I be profitable?" And the answer is, probably not if you stick to a strict traditionalist mindset. I think the GBA/DS generation of handhelds was the last chance for relatively old-fashioned down-to-the-metal, highly optimized C/C++/assembly coding to make a good profit. However, that's not going to stop me from continuing to code SNES style games in C and pixel art my graphics instead of using pre-rendered 3D models. There seems to be a distinct hole in the market for high quality games of that style anyway. Either that or I just haven't looked around enough.

Do I expect to make as much money as I would working at a big studio on high-profile PC or Playstation 4 games? Heck no, but I'll be a lot happier than if I spent my life monkeying around with libraries and massive aging codebases just to contribute a small bit to each game, most of which will probably flop due to executive meddling ruining the original vision (or having a crap vision to begin with). If I can make enough to continue doing it, that's better than selling myself to a life of mediocrity. The tradeoff is I don't get to have kids, because there's no way I'll make enough to afford that. But I'm not sure I'd want to subject anyone to the coming years of apocalypse anyway.

Back to the topic of game makers, I think they're great for kids to get something up and running quickly, practice design/art/music, and generally decide if they're interested in game development. I made stuff with RPG Maker 95 in my teens, and it was great learning experience. But IMO, that's all they should be used for.

Programming libraries are a lot less limiting, but I still avoid them if at all possible. I hate reading through heaps of documentation to get things up and running, only to have some brilliant design idea that the library can't do. And there's that stupid feeling of pride having "made it from scratch", despite the fact that you're always starting from some base, even if it's WinAPI and OpenGL. What really should matter is what point starts limiting your design choices.

I jokingly call these "crises of faith" with our chosen toolsets - I had one a few years back worried that I should switch from C++ to C# (I ended up sticking with C++ after considering heavily and bouncing it off someone else who wasn't even a programmer).

That's what I call it when I'm working on a game, and get in just deep enough that I can imagine what it will be like finished, and see that it won't be fun enough to be worth the time of making it, and give up

So am I wrong in assuming this guy is trolling?? I mean it seemed odd at first but then to say hes leaving because people disagree seems just too much. He doesnt listen to anyone and he says things that are just plain daft. I dont know. All I know is even Bethesda games have their own "gamemaker" tools built to make their own games and they are hugely succesful. Thats about all I can add because literally every point was made already.

Yeah, I don't think he was being serious at all.

So am I wrong in assuming this guy is trolling?? I mean it seemed odd at first but then to say hes leaving because people disagree seems just too much. He doesnt listen to anyone and he says things that are just plain daft. I dont know. All I know is even Bethesda games have their own "gamemaker" tools built to make their own games and they are hugely succesful. Thats about all I can add because literally every point was made already.

Thats a bit of a bland comparison, comparing content creation tools to a particular game to software like game maker or rpg maker doesn't really work out.

Although they work in a similar way internally, editors for games like skyrim are for adding new content to the game, not for creating something completely different. I would say the level of complexity there is very different.

As for him trolling I don't know, it's certainly seeming to work judging by how many people seem to have gotten really upset about what he said, either way.