this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2023
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Programming

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So ive been trying to code for a few mouths now but its kind ahard with life, depression, autism, and dylexia i just feel like this might be an impossible task. i really want to make a game and im not sure why, i even got rpg maker 2003 but idk how to use it do i learn myself or are there videos for it?

Im not sure if im doing thing wrong but how shoudl one start/do if they want to make video games on a low-endish computer? also i cant run things like unity or unreal, dang... feel free to share tips aswell and please be kind, ive been suggested coding/game dev alot for some reason and im not sure if its for me but idk what else to do.

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[–] aquaarmor23 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The most important piece of advice I can offer is that, above all else, it's going to be far easier to get your feet wet with learning if you're working on something you're interested in - since you mention RPG Maker, a pretty intuitive place to start would be to make a game, it's going to start out small at first but as you put time into it it can grow and become more complex as your skills grow.

Two specific things that you mentioned in your post that I can specifically comment on:

its kind hard with life, depression, autism, and dyslexia i just feel like this might be an impossible task.

Just using my colleagues and myself as a sample group, I can confidently say that, while the neurodivergence certainly doesn't make it EASIER, it's absolutely possible to be on the spectrum, dyslexic, or depressed and still be a fantastic programmer - I know a ton of great people who fall into any combination of the three. There's a ton of people across the programming community who deal with each of them and, as a result, there's a lot of useful tools that've been developed to make it easier to work with (in particular, dyslexic-friendly fonts come to mind)

i even got rpg maker 2003 but idk how to use it do i learn myself or are there videos for it?

Good instinct, the correct answer to just about every single programming problem in the known universe is going to be "have you tried looking it up on (google/youtube/stackoverflow)"? There's a ton of people who've put their time into creating tutorials, how-to guides, and walkthroughs to get started on doing specific tasks in given programming languages or environments, and you can find a guide on just about anything as a result. In particular, something along the lines of "getting started with RPG maker 2003" is probably going to be the way to go at first - personally, I find I learn best from Youtube tutorial-type videos, but you'll learn over time what works best for helping YOU learn.

[–] superfes 2 points 1 year ago

Seconded, I always give the same advice, do something you're actually interested in doing.

Partly because it can help keep your interest through the pain of learning, and partly because every software dev wonders "does anybody even want this?" And usually you'll find your market by creating something for yourself.

[–] donio 2 points 1 year ago

Yep, a "scratch your own itch" project is the best way to stay motivated.

[–] aperson 2 points 1 year ago

Maybe start with a 2d game and try out love?

[–] gaael 1 points 1 year ago

Depression/anxiety/ADHD hobbyist programmer here.

What really worked for me was having access to a learning course with an adapted progression and gamified mechanisms.

The usual sequence was :

  • some material to go through (usually articles, some videos)
  • some easy application exercises
  • some trickier exercises
  • small-time "projects" sprinkled here and there to make use of different concepts learned previously

This was great for me because :

  • I didn't have to look for the basics learning material, so I always had enough information to be able to google the right keywords when I was struggling with an exercises, I was never really stuck
  • I always managed to do at least the easy exercises and the first of the trickier ones
  • the projects assignments were always structured the same way : get a simple mvp working, add some crude features, refine a subset of the features, go the extra length so I always managed to produce somethkng and felt challenged to do a little more

I learned by doing stuff I didn't care about (like scraping official government pages to create a database of elected representatives) but in a setting where I felt enough success and progression that I was able to enjoy challenge.

After a few months I had understood enough to begin creating stuff I was actually interested in. By then, I was able to understand the answers written in programming forums (be it Stack Overflow or subreddits) and to parse language official documentation.

Anyway, I wish you happiness on your learning path !

[–] Piers 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Assuming RPG maker 2003 isn't vastly different to whichever version I was playing around with way back when, then it is a good tool to make a very specific type of game (ie, a classic 2D jRPG) reasonably easily.

That could make it a perfect tool to get your feet wet or one that will actually cause you grief.

If what excites you about making a game is building a world, populating it with people and enemies for your player to interact (and battle with), writing character dialogue to tell a story, designing playable characters that level up their stats over time and you like 2D jRPGs, then find a couple of resources that teach the RPG Maker basics and dive in.

If you're more interested in creating a variety of different types of games right away and you're interested in the technical puzzle of how to actually make things happen in a game and designing your own solutions then you may want to try going in a different direction, either of learning programming in a more general sense or just diving in and learning as you working with a more versatile game development engine that does less of the groundwork for you.

Any of those approaches are equally valid, it really just depends on your own preferences and what you are hoping to achieve. There's also nothing wrong with trying out a few different things until you find the right approach for you.

Personally, I found RPG maker to be too narrow for me as I spent a lot of time trying to force it to do things it wasn't specifically designed to make easy to do, so didn't really make progress until I moved to a more flexible engine (in my case, I use Godot, the FOSS game engine) and I've found I really need to combine general study of the technology, with following some tutorials and just working on my own small projects to figure things out as I go, in order to make progress. Other people find they need to stick to a single learning technique at a time and prefer to learn using software that gives them a little less creative freedom but makes the process easier to get going with.

Do you know what it is about making games that appeals to you? Do you have specific goals in mind? (It's ok if you aren't sure of the answers to those questions, but the more you can tell us about where you're coming from, the better we can offer specific advice.)

Edit: quick note to be clear as I didn't notice your comment about your PC not running Unreal or Unity. Godot is a similar piece of software to those but is much more likely to run on your PC, so if you are thinking you want to try that style of game development software then definitely give it a go (you just might have to make sure you set the renderer to one of the lower end modes. I appreciate that probably sounds like meaningless jargon right now. The renderer is essentially the bit of your game engine that actually puts together the graphics. You can choose which of a few different ones to use. Some of them are easier to run and have wider compatibility, others are harder to run, have narrower compatibility, but have additional features. In Godot, you can easily choose between them both for within your Godot project and separately for the actual final produced game. Can't remember which is which right now as it all got changed around for the recent major update but you'll likely recognise what it is and have clear information in the app when you get to that point.)