How to get started in GameDev?

Question

Game development

For now, I don’t consider game development as a job in the future, but rather the embodiment of a childhood dream, a hobby.
I settled on Unity + C#, as there are the most resources to learn. I don’t want to start with books for the completely “zero”. I got into Python programming for about two months, studied HTML CSS layout for about a month and about the same amount of JS, tried working on the backend with PHP a little, now I have abandoned the web and settled on AndroidDev Kotlin. This is to the fact that I know some bases, I am familiar with OOP, I do not need to re-learn the for loop and anonymous functions. What books/video courses can you recommend to me?

Answer 1

You need to start the path in gamedev by abandoning this crazy idea and go either to enterprise development or mobile development, if you don’t want to crunch 24/7 for a meager salary and constantly hear: “There are +100500 yellowmouths who are ready to take your place, because making toys is "fun" and everyone wants it."

Answer 2

If you know the basics, take UE4 with blueprints. You won't write a single line of code.
You can get graphics from Quixel, for UE4 the library is free. Models in Blender.
Video courses: "Ok Google! Give me UE4 game development courses."
If you go to the forums for every question, you will only waste your time.

Answer 3

First, I would advise you to avoid video courses, it is better to learn how to use official documentation and read books - any that are available. Due to the specifics of a modern technical author, this is advisable, not all authors are good teachers - it is possible to understand the subject by reading the same thing in the documentation, in one, two or three books, switching from one presentation to another. That is, I can not agree with the advice to read one particular book. The more literature on the topic, the better.
Secondly, it makes sense to set realistic and achievable tasks on time, and solve them by practicing.
Third, it's okay if you make a small project on Unity, another on Unreal, before you link your future with one or another platform. Since no one will give you advice or an answer in advance, what exactly is yours, what will cause great sympathy as an environment, and what is better for you to study - and for the outlook and in self-education, this approach is extremely useful when you see and feel a little different approaches.
I will add, because not mentioned in the answers above, you should pay attention to Godot, it has a low entry threshold, simple documentation, brilliant architecture and has its own solutions that are not inferior to Unity / Unreal.

Answer 4

The main tool is a programming language, and the game engine should be considered as a framework, so if you chose Unity, then at the initial stages you better focus on learning C #. It is better to study on a large number of small tasks, for example, write your own implementations of collections, delegates and events, your class that serializes data of any type into CSV format, etc.
From books, if you know the basics, I recommend C # in Depth by John Skeet, there is in Russian.
It is better to start game development with simple game mechanics, the same Tetris is quite suitable. Implement the core mechanics, then diversify the gameplay with a meta game, implement saving the game state to the server. Learn how to write modules, even for a small project it is convenient to put the resource loader, localization, UI manager, network code and other subsystems into separate modules. Understand the features of the distribution platform, if you are developing for Android, then write a game module in Kotlin.
Most likely you will have difficulties with the design of the game architecture,
a good overview of the client architecture is in the Yandex course "Development for iOS. Taking off".
If you want something more focused on a given subject area, then you can explore the pattern "Entity - Component - System". Take a simple compact library like
https://github.com/Leopotam/ecs
and build your project using this approach.
The best source of information is the documentation, but
if you still want Unity courses and tutorials, there are official tutorials:
https://learn.unity.com/
there are interesting youtube channels, for example:
https://www.youtube.com/ c/CodeMonkeyUnity/
text-based tutorials, with an emphasis on graphics, for example:
https://catlikecoding.com/unity/tutorials/