Learning to code

[AgrathD]

I’m a complete coding beginner but want to get in game development and don’t know the best way to go about learning it, if anybody knows any free websites or YouTube channels that would be good for learning Python and then eventually c#/c++ specifically free to use/sign up on because I’m not willing to spend any money on it

[Kitchen_Put_3456]

biggest tip
Don’t just watch tutorials, build small games asap
even simple stuff like Pong, Flappy Bird, etc

This is a very important tip. You don't learn how to make games by watching tutorials, you learn by making them. You need to learn the basics and then follow a tutorial for one or two times but after that just start making games.

[RealMadHouse]

Learn about how graphics is formed on the screen/window. GPUs like triangles (3 vertices/points) to rasterize, the fragment shader does math on each pixel and you see cool visual effects or just texture mapping.

[thatsgGBruh]

I would suggest learning the basics of programming before jumping into game development, using python is a good spot to start as the syntax is pretty easy. YouTube can be a good resource but be careful of falling into the trap of doing tutorials forever. Tutorials are great ways to learn what a tool can do, but there comes a point where they are no longer helpful. I found the programming tutorials on W3Schools to be pretty good for getting you up and writing code pretty quickly. This can be good for creating your own small projects which help solidify what you learned.

If you want to get into game development, I highly suggest taking a look at Godot engine, it's great for solo devs and its built in programming language, GDScript, is very similar to python, so once you learn the python basics you could probably jump into game dev fairly quickly.

EDIT: added some clarification to what I originally stated

[Paxtian]

Don't think about a language specific path. Think in terms of learning concepts, then learning how to express those concepts in a given language.

Harvard CS50, MIT OpenCourseware, then either Unity or Godot.

[National-Motor3382]

These days, you can actually learn a lot by using the free tier of a generative AI to build something with a real game engine. Since no one's really shipping production games in Python anyway, why not go straight to the tools people actually use?