From Dev to Gamedev: How I Speedran Learning How to Make Video Games

#gamedev #unity3d #learning

My first attempt at learning how to make video games was at 15 years old. I downloaded Unity, looked up an incomprehensible French tutorial with a disastrous audio quality, and promptly decided that it wasn’t for me.

Seven years later, in 2022, with a computer engineering degree in hand, I tried again. But this time, I wasn’t alone. I had two major advantages:

A boyfriend who had a degree in video game development, and had worked in an indie studio for a bit.
A few gamejams under my belt, but purely as an artist.

In 2022 and 2023, my friends and I entered five gamejams, during which I didn’t write a line of code. It made me fall in love with the format, and I wanted more. So, interestingly enough, I didn’t learn gamedev to create a dream game or with the idea of making commercial games.

No, I just followed the first assignment of my then-boyfriend’s very first course on Unity and learned about the Inspector, GameObjects, the very basics of ECS (Entity Component Script), and the old Input System. It took me about an hour to make a cube that spun when I pressed E and that I could move around like a barbarian by modifying the Transform directly.

I then clapped my hands, and happily declared that I was ready for my first solo gamejam.

Let me tell you, I learned more in the week-end I tried to cobble a game together than I would’ve in weeks of tutorials. Here’s what the game looked like:

All the text is handwritten, except for the score that’s the default Unity font because I didn’t have the time to figure out how fonts worked. The assets were supposed to be placeholders, but of course I didn’t have the time to make final assets. I haven’t looked at the project since 2022 and I’m pretty sure I would cry if I did.

Sadly, I can’t let you play it because I thought it was very smart to plaster my real name on it and I don’t think we’re that close yet, with this being my first post and all. Stick around and maybe, if you ask nicely, I’ll repackage it.

But overall, it was not a bad gamejam game at all! It had a title screen, a victory and a defeat screen, a simple gameplay and a clear goal. Actually, it ended up being better than some of my later games simply because of how limited I was by my own abilities. But that’s a topic for another day and another post.

This looks like a good timing to tell you that if you like my content, you can follow me here and subscribe to me for free on Substack!

Compared to my spinning cube, this game taught me:

How to instantiate GameObjects (and thus, use prefabs).
A tiny bit of UI.
Colliders (these were a big hurdle, especially figuring out the static vs. dynamic interactions).
Very basic scene management.

It didn’t have any sound at all, which many people mentioned, but overall I had very encouraging comments, and I was super happy about it! I ranked 35th out of 145, which is not a bad result at all for a first time solo jammer (if you feel otherwise, feel free to drop a formal duel request in the comments, and we shall fight for my honor).

This first experience cemented that gamejams are super duper cool, and so is having a friend with some experience who can help you. I also want to talk about it in the future, but I found back then that Unity ressources for people who know how to code were scarce. I wouldn’t have had the patience to sit through another tutorial that treats opening Visual Studio and writing a for loop like a death sentence. I didn’t know C#, but I knew C++ and OOP in general. I just needed someone to fast track me to the specifics of C# and Unity.

So yeah, I kept entering gamejams and learning more and more, making bigger and bigger games (sometimes too ambitious) and feeling more and more confident in my abilities.

In the following three years, from late 2022 to now, I submitted 13 other games to various gamejams. Four made it to the top 10, and two to the podium (out of ~150 games each time). I also got started on maybe half a dozen other games I didn’t submit for various reasons. I streamed gamedev on Twitch for a few months as I waited to start my PhD, working on Trijams (a weekly 3 hours jam) while chatting with people.

I’m debating whether to explain in detail here how amazing gamejams are to work out your gamedev muscles, but I think it’d be a bit much for a first time. I know myself, I could write a 10k post without realizing it, and this one doesn’t even have subtitles, so it’d be a nightmare for you.

But in the meantime, you can check some of the games I released myself on my public itch.io page, if you are curious. Some of my games are in restricted, but I’m planning on making them available again in the future, as I mentioned before.

Overall, I had a hell of a good time¹. 10/10 would recommand.

And now, by starting this blog, I hope to bring you along me in my jam adventures! I will share devlogs, gamejam tips that go beyond “get enough sleep” and “small scope”, and talk about gamedesign, and development methodologies, and how they differ between big, commercial projects and jams. I’ve been reading and consuming a lot of content on game design, pedagogy, and fun, and did a lot of thinking, too. You might find that I have a few interesting things to say. Or maybe I’m overpromising, but either way, you’ll have to stick around to find out.

Thanks for reading to the end, drop a like and a comment (I’ve always wanted to say/write that, I don’t really use social media) and I’ll see you next time. Uhhh there should be an actionable takeaway at the end of this post or something. If you’re learning game development, enter a gamejam. Any jam. Here’s the link to itch.io’s jams. Choose one and do it, make a game. Tell me about it. I’ll know if you didn’t.

And if you’re already a gamejam aficionado, send this to that one friend who’s been watching tutorials for ages, so that they see the light and you can do jams together.

See you!

— Kat