The course is over, but your game development journey is only starting. As we mentioned before, in programming, you never stop learning.
The good news is that you now have the necessary foundations to learn from all kinds of resources and start creating many sorts of games.
Your main challenge will now be to gain the required experience to know how to combine all the tools you learned.
In this guide, we’ll talk about how to keep improving your game development skills efficiently after this course.
We have four tips for you:
At this stage, a good way to stay motivated is to find a couple of ideas for games or programs you would like to make and code small bits of them.
For example, it can be taking one mechanic or coding just one game system as a little standalone demo.
At this stage, though, you may still not know how to approach coding some game mechanics.
While we encourage you to try to code these on your own, an excellent way to get a project started if you’re stuck is to find a good guide or tutorial for it and build upon that learning resource.
There are tons of tutorials and code demos waiting for you, be it on YouTube, several Godot tutors’ websites, or the code-sharing platform GitHub.
Search for a tutorial or demo that aligns with the mechanic you want to code and follow along to get started.
Once you have some foundations, ask yourself what would be a cool change or new mechanic you could add on top. This is an excellent exercise to transition from the “remix” to the “create” learning phase.
We highly recommend the Godot recipes by KidsCanCode: https://kidscancode.org/godot_recipes/
It’s an excellent resource by a game industry veteran who’s also experienced in teaching beginners to code.
There’s a critical mistake you absolutely don’t want to make: picking a project that constantly overwhelms you and that you can never finish. Feeling that your progress is painfully slow is too likely to demoralize you.
You should never forget that the commercial games you play are built by professionals working full-time for long periods of time.
If we take an extreme example, Cyberpunk 2077 took millions of hours of work to complete and cost hundreds of millions of dollars. That’s many human lives’ worth of work.
But even a seemingly “small” game like Super Meat Boy took eighteen months of full-time work for two experienced developers.
So even indie games aren’t great examples of what to do to keep learning.
You want to work on much smaller projects instead. This brings us to your projects’ scope.
In this course, you saw the work involved in making even small demos. We can only recommend you make more projects of that scale.
Keep making toys and tiny demos with few game mechanics and a single playable area. That’s the fastest way to improve your skills.
As soon as you try to make something bigger, with many systems interacting, you will see that your time estimates will be entirely off. When game projects get complex, it becomes tough to estimate the work involved.
More importantly, over your first one to two years of programming, you will improve so fast that in every new project, you will code better and faster than the previous one.
That’s another reason to keep projects short at first: every new project will allow you to start with better code foundations and progressively make things bigger.
Another common pitfall is to focus too much on goals like completing projects and pressuring yourself instead of focusing on the process and building strong habits.
I’m talking about goals like “This year, I’ll finish a tactical RPG like Fire Emblem with five missions and ten playable characters.”
Or even “This week, I’ll finish a little demo with two characters fighting.”
To learn fast, you need to focus on consistent practice. When you complete things doesn’t matter. You’ll finish projects when you finish them.
As discussed in the course’s introduction, you want to practice frequently and with great focus.
Set a time to work on toys and demos a little bit daily without worrying about anything else.
It would be best if you weren’t working under the pressure of deadlines at this stage.
You want to learn to enjoy game development itself. To do so, practice as little or as much as what feels comfortable to you.
As you become more comfortable with code and learn to appreciate the process, you will enjoy working on varied projects.