Hello Current and Future Game Dev Elite,

I am at the very beginning of wanting to start learning how to develop my own games. In doing so i have been reading a lot of these forums and elsewhere and have been starting to get a picture of what I really want to accomplish when I set out to learn how to develop games. Originally, I thought that I wanted to get good at a language and hone my skills and try to land a job at one of the big developers. The more I soul-search'd on this topic I think I may be more interested in taking on a project on my own, or possibly with a small team.

With that being said, I know that I need to rein in my expectations of what I am going to be able to accomplish on my own. I'm probably not going to be releasing the next big MMO with a one man team (probably not before 2050 anyway). So before I start to get my hands dirty in some coding and set myself on a path to begin teaching myself, I want to make sure that I am; a) being realistic about the types of games I can make, and b) learning the tools that are going to give me the ability to create the environments and game play that I want to make.

I am going to start with 2D coding while I'm learning, but I want to be able to eventually make 3D games as well. I also want to be able to learn and implement networking and multi-player support. I would like the ability to reach as many platforms as possible but my order of priority would be PC/MAC, Mobile, Consoles (in that order).

Hopefully that is enough information for any of you to be able to recommend the tools I should focus on. Thank you all in advance!

Pick one language, one tool, and one platform, and make a simple clone for it. Then you'll understand what it takes.

Thank you for the advice. I think that is a sound approach. I was thinking Unity may be a good tool to use for my needs, would you agree? If so, what language would compliment that? I had been looking into C# and started learning that a little bit (still know next to nothing), should I continue with that to get started? Platform I can narrow down after I know which tools to use.

I understand that this forum probably sees similar questions all of the time, but I didn't see any that addressed this specifically (working as a solo programmer) so I really just want to decide on my tools and get to work. Thank you again for taking the time to answer me!

unity is a really easy to use engine you only need to know basics if u want to make simple games. but if you want to make something from just pure code you can try using library's for your code language.

Alright, I really want to start diving into this. Let's say I want to learn C#, and Unity and focus on the iOS platform. This is with me going at this as a solo project. Is this a good starting point?

yeah just start looking at tutorials for C# one day and for unity the next back and forth you will learn how to use unity and you will learn C# so you can make even more use of unity

if you have steam http://store.steampowered.com/search/?developer=GTGD check out this tutorial series they are for C# and unity.

I used Unity in the past and just never really liked it. It's too WYSIWYG for me, maybe. It's also not really designed for 2d games, though you can make it do that with some work. I would look at learning SDL2. It's super cross platform, has a port for almost any device you can think of including PC/Mac/Linux, iOS, Android, and even Raspberry Pi and your experience won't go to waste because when you want to move onto 3d you can just build OpenGL on top of it.

https://www.libsdl.org/

These tutorials are decent though you'll definitely want to do some more google searching for other ones on your own.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3A4F71D0B9994FC1

I would suggest to start with Unity 3D (C#). they have lots of tutorials (

And the internet is FULL of free Unity Tutorials in C# and JS. As well a lot of paid but more professional lessons too. Never the less, you will have more than you need in order to get you started :)

I used Unity in the past and just never really liked it. It's too WYSIWYG for me, maybe. It's also not really designed for 2d games, though you can make it do that with some work. I would look at learning SDL2. It's super cross platform, has a port for almost any device you can think of including PC/Mac/Linux, iOS, Android, and even Raspberry Pi and your experience won't go to waste because when you want to move onto 3d you can just build OpenGL on top of it.

https://www.libsdl.org/

These tutorials are decent though you'll definitely want to do some more google searching for other ones on your own.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3A4F71D0B9994FC1

It has official 2D support now, but you're right, it does feel a bit too WYSIWYG-ish to the point that scripting it was more confusing for me than using a straight-up framework like XNA. Perhaps I just need to have more experience with it.