I’ve played video games my entire life. As a kiddo, I huddled over my GameBoy Color for hours upon hours until my eyes were completely bloodshot (remember the days before backlit screens??) and my batteries were just about give out and destroy the progress I had FINALLY made in the game. And as an adult, I still take comfort from games, perhaps just not quite as obsessively as when I was a kid.

Despite all of this time spent gaming, I wouldn’t consider myself particularly good at games. Strategy has never been my strong suit, so I typically loudly stumble through stealth games, Leeroy Jenkins through soulslike games, and I’m no stranger to completely skipping through tutorials and jumping into a game that I have absolutely no context for how to play.

But, the medium of video games for storytelling is why I go back time and time again. Video games are more immersive than books or movies for me personally as you become a part of the story. To this day, as I’m playing a game, I’ll have unscripted conversations between characters in my head to add backstory or imagine how different characters react as my typically loudly dressed character walks onto the scene. Whether a simple farming sim or a wildly detailed RPG, it brings me so much joy to live in that alternate reality for a slice of time.

With an appreciation to the art of gaming and a love of programming, learning how to do game development seems like a natural hobby, but I’ve always had one reason or another to not get into it. Whether it was feeling like I needed to do all of the art and music work (spoilers: you don’t need to) or stress about learning a new programming language, I put off game development time and time again.

That is, until I added creating a game to my 29 -> 30 project. As a part of this project, I had the goal to learn just enough to create a small game. To meet that goal, I started learning Unity in early July to create a game that I’m affectionately calling Prancer.

Soon after I started that project, my game dev enemy bffl Ducky and I were joking around about potentially joining a game jam once I gained some more skills, and he mentioned that Game Maker’s Toolkit was going to be hosting a very popular 48-hour game jam at the end of the week – from July 7th – July 9th. Being competitive people, we both agreed we would participate and go head to head to see who could make the best game.

The only problem? I still had no idea how to make a game. The race was on for me to learn as much as I could about Unity and C# development with the single goal of beating Ducky creating a game by the end of the weekend.

If you’re interested in the specifics of my development learning process, I recorded a very serious vlog throughout the game jam (link found at the end of this post!), but here I want to highlight my top five tips from what I learned as a novice game development, or even just for someone jumping into a new programming language head first. Some of these might be seemingly obvious, or might not yield long term skills, but it kept me going when the pressure was on!

5. Documentation is a godsend, but YouTube is your best friend.

I am a self-proclaimed documentation snob. While I don’t always write documentation to the standards I hold others to, I really appreciate good documentation. I especially appreciate plain-language documentation, as I’m not trying to get out a dictionary while also comprehending whatever bizarre syntax situation I found myself in.

But I’m also a highly visual learner. If documentation doesn’t contain examples that I can take apart and learn from, the info just won’t stick with me. That’s where YouTube comes in.

Most of my success in this game jam came from cycles of watching something on YouTube, implementing it for myself, and then making adjustments to the code to meet my needs. While, yes, that does involve copying code from other people and not deeply understanding what each and every word means, I began to recognize commonly used keywords and understand when and how to use them in a language that I was vastly unfamiliar with. This lowered the level of effort to begin using this language and allowed me to learn in the best way possible for me – by doing!

4. Learn by doing – just try the thing.

Look at that smooth transition between tips!

9 times out of 10, you won’t break something so badly as a novice developer that you can’t fix it. So seriously – when you’re learning, just try things. Write a line of code, see if it works – if it doesn’t, you just found a new way to not do something! And if it works, see if you can modify it to do something else! That was a solid 90% of my learning process with Unity over the weekend, and while it could definitely be mildly frustrating at times, I wasn’t getting overwhelmed by all of the things I didn’t know. Instead, I was highly focused on getting one singular thing to work at a time. That scope felt much more manageable for me.

3. When in doubt, map it out.

When learning by doing, it’s easy to find yourself down any number of rabbit holes. Let yourself wander, but don’t forget that you’re trying to accomplish some goal – if you find yourself on a Wikipedia page about the history of an algorithm, you’ve probably strayed a little bit too far! (Lookin’ at you, cutscenes in Unity!)

To help prevent this, it can be helpful to map out what you’re trying to accomplish at a higher level so that you have a development roadmap to follow. For me, this was as simple as mapping out the unique characters, scenes, and impacts to the player character that I wanted to see throughout my game, which helped me flesh out what I needed to build to stay on track.

2. Don’t let perfection be the enemy of good enough.

This quote was mentioned by a good friend at work once and I took it to heart. It’s all too common that I’ll strive to make a project perfect, hyper fixate on components of the project that really don’t matter all too much, and then get completely burnt out afterwards. This is so important when learning a new language – and especially when doing game development, I found. Don’t fixate on pixel perfection from the start – you can always improve upon what you’re working on later, but make sure you keep developing towards your goal.

1. Motivation is a powerful tool. Find yours!

Ultimately, what was different between my previous attempts to learn game development and this particular time where I actually made a game?

My motivation.

In the past, I was aiming to make some lofty, triple A game that would bring folx to tears.

This time, I had 48-hours to do the best I could while simultaneously competing with a close friend. During those 48 hours, we challenged each other, we checked in with each other, we supported each other. My motivation was to get to the end, and that worked for me.

This might not be as applicable for long running projects, but motivation through accountability can be a helpful tool, and a bit of healthy competition can help to kickstart doing something that otherwise might be fairly overwhelming to do.

With these tips in mind, I’m so happy to say that I successfully created a game for the GMTK game jam. While it’s not polished nor much of a game, I made it. Introducing: Killer Crush.

Finally, as promised, I vlogged some of my game development process for a Behind the Scenes look at creating Killer Crush. Enjoy my slow descent into insanity!