Newbie dev, not new to unfinished projects.
TLDR I need to figure out how to get "experience" without suffering as much on things that will simply take away from my drive to make the full game, and I know purchasing professional guidance is an option, but it's too expensive for what is ultimately a passion project.
So, I have a grand idea for a spiritual successor to a dead game (TerraTech)
The problem is that while I have someone who would absolutely help me, and while they've worked in 3d Unity before, they haven't worked with an ECS. (Required to manage the sheer number of physics objects and raycast (not hitscan) projectiles the game has to simulate.) They're also somewhat busy.
I know that I'm new and that my project is ambitious to say the least. However, demo and practice games simply do not interest me. I have an idea for *one* demo game to practice making an in-game UGC editor (levels and weapons) in 2d. (Love you, Distance/Refract Studios)
One. I have been racking my head for ANYTHING that has even the tiniest chance of not just immediately causing burnout. And I can come up with exactly one; it isn't even meant to be balanced, just stupid, silly fun. I don't plan on doing bugfixes or updates.
I have TRIED to make demo games according to tutorials which simply hand me assets to use and walk me through it step by step; however, I struggle to even get unity to interact with my C# scripts.
So... Ai is retarded and can't really teach me things. I struggled to make a button function because things need to be explained to me in a very specific way, on occasion, and it took someone with the "Professional" tag in the Unity subreddit to explain what I was doing wrong in a way I finally understood. The timeline for my game is years with help. Or decades without.
There are plenty of free courses; I understand there's parts of the process of learning I can't skip, the biggest one being failure. I'm okay with making mistakes as long as they're repairable; but I don't want to suffer the same fate as the original game (outdated tech and spaghetti being the bane of the game's longevity.)
Does anyone have at LEAST one of the following;
- A course that's very compact and gives me the toolset required to create unique projects instead of creating a bunch of slop that's supposed to teach a dumbass like me how to use the fundamental tools
- A mindset that will help me deal with the pain of following basic tutorials when I could be spending the valuable time actually making progress on the game
- A mindset that allows me to forge ahead without getting anxiety over "making mistakes" when a decision has to be made that changes my options later down the line? (E.g I toiled over which engine and ECS to use for my game. Apparently Unity is the best choice since it's the most established and biggest budget, but I looked at Godot as well as some other niche engines built more readily around ECS and mass collision management. A good use of my time, but still excessive, it took me almost a week.)
