Escaping Tutorial Hell

David · January 23, 2023

Many new game makers get this feeling of being stuck in doing tutorial after tutorial and that they don’t know how to do anything except follow tutorials. My advice: Don’t stop at the end of a tutorial. Come up with your own small tweaks and features and implement them. If you feel like you need another tutorial then find smaller features to tackle and work your way up.

Take a tutorial like this one and add more enemies. Add enemies that move in a different direction, have a different speed, or follow a sine wave. Try to do it without looking anything up. If that fails, scope down your plans. If it seems impossibly small and simple, google answers but not tutorials (stack overflow, reddit, etc). Try to piece together what people are saying and how to do it. If that fails, look up tutorials, watch, take notes, but don’t copy paste code. See if you can port their ideas to your code. If that fails, look yourself in the mirror and ask if you really tried hard enough to scope down and figure out this small step or if it just seemed too boring or too hard. If that fails, figure out how to motivate yourself to do hard and boring things (gamedev is full of them and they’re necessary).

I’ve worked in games professionally for more than a decade so it’s been a long time since I was stuck in tutorial hell. The above is my typical process when doing tutorials for a new engine or technology.

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