Hello GameDev!

I need some advice and guidance.

I'm 17 years of age, please do not stop reading because of that.

I live in Belgium and have been a game fan since the early years, not a game fan as in playing the games,

I was amazed by how it was done, and always wanted to know how it was done.

At the age of about 13 I started small, I made Runescape Private Servers with some friends.

The programming language was Java, so I got the hang of that. A year or 2 ago I moved to Minecraft plugins, which is also in Java.

Around that time I also tried out UDK, Unity, 3Ds Max and Maya. I sticked to Unity and 3Ds max, I prefer those since they're very user-friendly and I feel that they fit the way I work better than the other programs.

Now, about what I need advice on.

I am passionate about learning, I give up sleep just to learn more.

I did a lot of beginner tutorials on Unity and 3Ds Max, I even got a subscription on the digital-tutors website.

The thing is, there's beginner, and there's advanced. There is no inbetween.

The advanced things in unity and 3Ds Max are pretty complicated to me, and I just can't find any inbetween learning.

I just keep doing the basics over and over again, it never progresses. The advanced things are just too complicated, and the beginner things are getting too easy. I'm wondering, how do you get past the wall of beginner?

I'm also trying to work out if it is possible to create a game with a lot of players (MMOlike) in Unity without the use of SmartFoxServer.

Thank you.

Sincerely,

Mercenary147

To progress past the beginner stage you need to stop relying on tutorials, come up with a reasonably sized project of your own that goes slightly beyond what you know you're capable of and go for it.

As for MMOLike gameplay with unity, yes it is possible, the built in networking however is not suitable for it so you need to either use a suitable third party networking solution (Photon or smartfoxserver for example) or write your own networking.

-snip-

To progress past the beginner stage you need to stop relying on tutorials, come up with a reasonably sized project of your own that goes slightly beyond what you know you're capable of and go for it.

As for MMOLike gameplay with unity, yes it is possible, the built in networking however is not suitable for it so you need to either use a suitable third party networking solution (Photon or smartfoxserver for example) or write your own networking.

Thank you for your reply, and that does make sense!

The problem I'm having, is that I always aim way too high.

Could you tell me a sort of game, anything, that would be suitable in this case?

Thank you.

What is the most advanced game you've made thus far ?

On the easy side of things you got simple arcade games like pong, breakout, tetris, space invaders, asteroids.

A bit harder but still reasonably easy would be 2D platformers (like mario, megaman, commander keen, etc) (There is quite a bit of room to add advanced features in a 2D platformer though)

3D shooters are a bit harder (if you use an engine like Unity or UDK the difficulty of a 3D game isn't that much higher than for a 2D game though since some of the most challenging parts are handled by the engine).

On the more difficult side you have games that require advanced AI such as strategy games, team sports games(soccer, hockey), etc and multiplayer games (MMOs being even harder than normal multiplayer)

Regardless of what type of game you're making though, don't aim for anything that requires large amounts of high quality content unless you can generate it procedurally. (Creating high quality content is insanely timeconsuming)

You have to start small and build up from there.

Most devs I know (myself included) fall into the trap of coming up with this grand game that we want to make that is going to rival Warcraft or be the next superstar game, and that's just not realistic. Those games have whole project teams. many of us are simply one developers.

Start small. Build a basic space dogfighting game where you fly around empty space shooting at enemy ships. Create a breakout type game. Create a pong like game. Those sound very basic... and they should be because that's how you learn. You create basic games and then you move up to the next level.

Best of luck.