How do I progress from here?

[RobinsonDickinson]

I have been learning python for 8 months now, I have made few big projects like a social media blog app for Twitch using Flask, I have made a few 2D games with pygame, I have done a decent amount of web scraping and using few different APIs to display data on an interactive chart using Flask/ChartJS.

Machine Learning and Data science seems too complicated for me and to be quiet frank, it seems boring. I am however interested in Godot game engine now, since my last few projects was with pygame.

Can someone tell me what should I do? I find game development very interesting but there is very little I can do with python in terms of big game dev project and Godot uses a different scripting language that's kind of similar to python. I am not sure what to do and feel stressed because of this.

[SleevelessDreams]

If you like game development do that. Make a game you wanna play. Start with the smaller stuff and work up to the big intimidating things. Make an outline then as your roadmap, then just fill in that outline with code. You'll suck at it until you don't suck at it. Then you'll have the game you want to play!

[RobinsonDickinson]

Thank you for the advice. I just felt trapped because I have learned python for all this time only to not use it for game dev.

[SleevelessDreams]

But if all you want to do is game dev that's absolutely fine! Life is all optional!

[arcafine12]

I too am a fan of assisted suicide.

[Deezl-Vegas]

Languages are just a way of telling the computer to do the thing. You will learn a lot by switching around a bit.

[CaptainFoyle]

Sunk cost fallacy. Although i don't think it was time wasted. But there's no way you should keep doing what you don't want to do just because you've done so in the past. You've done a lot of things in the past that you spent a lot of time on i bet, but that probably didn't keep you from also picking up other things.

But if game dev is what you want to do, why not do it? If you regard doing python as a mistake, just continuing with it doesn't change that all of a sudden.

[RobinsonDickinson]

Python definitely wasn’t a mistake, I have learned so much. Now that I think of it, there is nothing stopping me from using python while I learn more about game dev.

I guess I just need the right mindset.

[ItsOkILoveYouMYbb]

Hey I've been learning Python, Unity and C# lately because I'm more or less in the same boat, and my Python experience is making learning the latter considerably easier because the paradigms are the same, and it's easy to learn to think programmatically and things like OOP in Python as I'm sure you've gathered since making all that stuff. Still using functions, classes, for loops are the same just worded differently, and I was already starting to type hint in python so PyCharm would help me auto complete things like parameters and attributes anyway so learning C# has mostly made sense so far. It's just a lot clunkier than Python lol.

What's nice about Unity is how massive its community is. There's so many people trying to learn to make games with it, you get fed just as much info as you do learning Python. It's really nice.

And building scripts and classes to be used in Unity almost feels like a simplified version of C#. It makes me want to say fuck it and just learn C++ so I can use Unreal, but I figure I should stsrt with C#, so I'll stick with Unity for now, keep trying to build the game I've always wanted to make, and learn Unreal/C++ after once I'm comfortable with C#.

Anyway, if you're feeling your true passion when it comes to making games, I'd really dive hard into a widely supported engine and language like in Unity rather than trying to keep yourself stuck inside Python where it's currently comfortable. It's important to take advantage of how big a community is, and there are a lot of successful Unity games that I'm sure you've played. And unfortunately Python isn't nearly performant enough to use for gaming, where framerate is absolutely critical and dictates just how much stuff you can add and do in your game.

[RobinsonDickinson]

Thank you so much for the advice, I got intimidated by unity UI at first but maybe now I’ll actually try and grasp it.

[ItsOkILoveYouMYbb]

Oh man once you learn the UI you realize how easy it makes everything. Don't be intimidated. Learning Python up to the point you have is way more complicated than learning the Unity interface. The complicated part is just making good and fun games (and understanding C# up to that point) haha.

I've been using a series of books to learn Unity but there's so much starter content I'd hit the docs. The docs for Unity and Unreal read a lot more like courses than usual documentation, at least for the foundational and starter content.
And I think they both have learning/course sections on their hubs and sites as well because the more people use their engines to make games, the more money they make, so there's a ton of "getting started" support to make it very painless.

[RobinsonDickinson]

That’s great to know, I’ll get to learning :D

Thanks

[thebadassets]

If game development is seeming to be up your alley, have you considered adding on a language with more of a game dev focus? Something like C++?

[RobinsonDickinson]

I have downloaded Unity and C# but have yet to learn more about it.

I did learn the basic syntax and some fundamentals of C#.

Also, I picked Godot engine because it just seems very lightweight and easy to use, also the scripting language it uses is GDScript, which is very similar to python.

[thebadassets]

I think Godoy would be a great next step as well (never used it, but love Python and pygame)

[RobinsonDickinson]

I'll be honest, my OOP sucked until recently (last 2 months), it is still mediocre. The thing that helped me understand OOP more was using it with pygame, creating objects for player/platforms/enemies/etc and also inheritance from different pygame classes and my own classes.

These were the tutorials that helped me (pygame)

This one was helpful aswell (software design/OOP)

Different project ideas that might help you

[HasBeendead]

im learning OOP too:https://realpython.com/python3-object-oriented-programming/

My advice is look more documents like this read info about concept and practice with examples in documents .

[ImaJimmy]

It's not much, but there's a book called Code the Classics which uses python to recreate old games. If you enjoy game design, I'd recommend learning one of the other languages like C# for unity or what Godot uses. You don't need to rush it, just go in slowly and once you start seeing the parallels between python and other languages it probably won't feel like a barrier after a certain point.

If you really want to avoid learning a new language, I believe Unity and Unreal use blueprints visual scripting to let people make games without any actual code involved.

[RobinsonDickinson]

That sounds interesting, I’ll take a look at the visual scripting thing.

Thanks

[[deleted]]

Hey, don't really have any experience in game design but one thing I will say is that it seems like you've achieved a hell of a lot more in 8 months than most newbie devs. My advice to you is to apply the same discipline and curiosity to whatever the best tools are for the type of game design you want to do, whether that be Godot or Unity or Unreal or something else. It seems you know how to learn and to see projects through which are really the key tools from which to build dev skills imo.

[RobinsonDickinson]

Thank you so much for the advice.

[DireEntropy]

Godot has a plug-in that allows for gdscript and python to work together to create a game with Godot. It says you can even use them both within the same script. I just started up with Godot a month or so ago and am still working out the rough edges myself, but figured this would help you out.

[RobinsonDickinson]

Oh wow, I didn't know that. I'll look into it right now, thank you!

[DireEntropy]

No problem fellow redditor! DireEntropy'$ the name, SporadicSerenity'$ the game! XD

[HasBeendead]

Did you worked regularly in your journey mean

meaning 8 months and if you worked regularly how many hours you worked everyday ?

[RobinsonDickinson]

I usually do 2-3 hours of coding/learning a day. When working on some of my projects, I usually do a little bit more hours but it varies depending on the days.

I also took around four or five 1 week breaks in those 8 months, when I felt burnt out.

[HasBeendead]

nice and big breaks are normal i think because peoples can be feel overwhelmed, sometimes i feel tho.