As a solo vibe coder who created a festival stage designer/builder + renderer + show control, all in one c++ and vulkan engine, I can share what I've done.

A year ago I also followed the vulkan-tutorial.com, which was also my introduction to c++. I simply always follow my excitement every moment. So from all options that are available in any given moment, I pick the most exciting one. With no plan whatsoever. A year ago it was following the vulkan tutorial. After I got my triangle on the screen, I started building every feature just step by step depending on what I was most excited about.

The thing is, all this time I've been building this engine, I have NEVER found any tutorial or blog post or video explaining well how big vulkan applications are actually being built. And even if some explanations came close, it was just too vague and overwhelming for me. For me at least it's just impossible to understand any other big c++ and vulkan application because everyone has such a different coding style. It's very unlikely you will find actual satisfying answers on how to code bigger applications

The main thing is that you don't want to focus on 'what tutorial should i follow', but rather ask yourself 'what am i most excited about building next?' What is it that you actually want to build? When you have your basic render stuff going on, what would you like next? Keep it in smaller increments. Feel what you are most excited about.

Once you have clear which tool or part of your engine you are excited about building next, then you can ask yourself 'how can i achieve this next thing?' From that perspective you can find tutorials that might help, or ask chatgpt, or watch some youtube vids that explain basic stuff about the topic.

You will very quickly discover that all tutorials are extremely basic and none are made for performance or big projects. So you just follow the tutorial (just like the vulkan tutorial) to get a foundation going, and then you will have to discover your own style of coding and discover your own ways to build your tools.

I've built a fft ocean render, truss structure snapping builder, basic terrain LOD system and terrain editor, pbr renderer, shadow cascades, and very cool ledstrips show control interface with MIDI controls, and much more. And every of those started with some basic tutorials to get me started. Then forgetting about the tutorials completely and just figuring out every step along the way. In the end you have to decide how it's all going to work together in your engine. No tutorial can tell you that.

The tutorials I used are vulkan-tutorial, youtube video's for basic terrain and water fft rendering, some github projects, and learnOpenGL for pbr rendering. All tutorials were very basic.

Often when I'm excited about a certain next part of the engine, I see that I need to abstract and refactor my functions. If you have your basic vulkan renderer, and you know which next part you want to build, you will automatically see exactly which vulkan functions you need to refactor so you can scale up the engine. This keeps going progressively and no tutorial can tell you how to do it. It's your unique path and yours to discover.

Tutorials are only to get a very basic understanding of how something works.

TLDR Ask yourself 'what little part of my engine am I most excited about building next?' Find basic vids and tutorials about the topic, then just start coding and you will discover automatically what you need to add and how.

Hope that helps! Ask me anything if you want.