this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2024
177 points (97.8% liked)
PC Gaming
8581 readers
859 users here now
For PC gaming news and discussion. PCGamingWiki
Rules:
- Be Respectful.
- No Spam or Porn.
- No Advertising.
- No Memes.
- No Tech Support.
- No questions about buying/building computers.
- No game suggestions, friend requests, surveys, or begging.
- No Let's Plays, streams, highlight reels/montages, random videos or shorts.
- No off-topic posts/comments, within reason.
- Use the original source, no clickbait titles, no duplicates. (Submissions should be from the original source if possible, unless from paywalled or non-english sources. If the title is clickbait or lacks context you may lightly edit the title.)
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Here's the thing, though. Just coding a game is a lot, before worrying about actually designing mechanics and managing meta-progression and writing even a basic story and world building, etc.
Making a fan project is real, concrete experience. It allows you to focus on one specific thing (actually writing the code and managing the codebase) without focusing on all those details. There's a reason most programming courses involve making simplistic clones of stuff that already exists. Many game development classes/tutorials do exactly the same, and work you through a clone of some other, pretty simple game.
That's what a fan project like this is, but it lets you focus on how a game larger in scope manages all the same problems instead of how to do it in brick breaker or whatever. It's valuable experience that's hard to replicate on a smaller project, and it's how some people learn best.
Others absolutely will do better starting small and just iteratively building up forever, but it's not the only way to learn. This approach is legitimate and for many people, better.
Now advertising it? Not a huge point of that. Unless you're actually asking people for feedback (how did they solve this problem?) and learning from example that way, you don't gain anything from telling people about it.
You get the motivation to continue; other people are looking forward to your progress and results.