General Discussion

I always suggest origami for these questions.

It's cheap, you only need paper.
It can be as simple or complex as you'd like it to be.
Plenty of free resources available online.
Doesn't need a lot of space, just a table.

Something like drawing or digital painting might appeal to you. Neither require a powerful computer (or even a computer at all if you use physical materials) and are inexpensive to get into.

Another thing I personally like doing is baking! Gives my mind something to do and I get tasty treats at the end that I can have myself or share.

I do cross stitch which is a low barrier to entry IMO

And there are a bunch of nerdy patterns on etsy

You got dealt a bad hand. I can commiserate. One thing I've learned about that is to stop blaming myself for everything. It's not your fault that you struggle with your issues. Try to love yourself as much as possible. Negative thoughts lead to more negative thoughts and eventually to depression.

As for making a game, I think I have a good starting point for you. Take a look at Gameboy Studio. You can make playable games without knowing how to code.

https://www.gbstudio.dev/

No way, I just saw this morning that Harvard has a free online course in game development, and it's available now. You should take a look and see if it interests you :)! You can do it from home.

https://pll.harvard.edu/course/cs50s-introduction-game-development

By the way, I also suffer from depression and I know how hard it is. I hope in the dark times you can find some compassion for yourself. I know for me, making it through the day sometimes is an accomplishment in and of itself. Try to see if you can practice not calling yourself a loser even when you feel like it. You are not a loser, you may be struggling right now, but if you saw a friend going through what you're going through, would you call them a loser? Probably not. I try to replace those thoughts with "today, I'm not feeling like I'm where I want to be, but I'm doing the best I can, and that's enough."

Anyway, wishing you well and I hope you can find some peace.

Learn to do card tricks

Oh god the driving thing was the Bane of my existence for YEARS. I basically made myself a desensitization program so I could learn to drive. Everyday I would sit behind the wheel with the car off until that wasn't scary. (Took about a week.)Then the next step would be turning the car on (another fews days.) Next was putting it in gear but not going anywhere. Then pulling forward and backwards etc... until I could go out on the roads and get my learners.

This whole process took over a month. If I freaked out I had to go back to the previous step. I based all this off of animal desensitization programs becuase I am Autistic AF. Sorry for the wall of text but I wanted to give you some advice and hope for the future!

If you want there is a community for autism!

https://lemmy.world/c/autism

You are more than welcome there.

Hey there, sorry to hear you're struggling.

I was kind of toying around with some of the same interests before I went back to school. Have you thought about web design/development?

It's easy to get started, and there is near limitless freedom in your ability to create things both from a visual, and front design perspective and a also ton of different programming languages for building apps. You can go full stack and do a bit of everything, or specialize in just about anything (seriously - design/ux, frontend development, backend development, devops, databases, digital maps, digital signage, salesforce, analytics, etc etc).

At the very least, it might act as a gateway to upping your programming skills. Once you get more experienced if you find game development is still something you want to pursue, there is no shortage of javascript-based game engines 🤓

I've been doing web development for the past 7 years and I'm still getting my mind blown and learning new things every day. I love it.

Whatever it is you choose to pursue, don't give up! Keep taking small steps, building small projects, and learning new things. It may not feel like you're getting everywhere but it's so satisfying once you start to feel the pieces come together.

You've got this.

Im autistic and not currently dyslexic but have struggled with it in the past due to some other health issues.

Anyways, feeling you hard on this with the coding especially. I started trying to learn to code back in 98 I think with simple HTML as a kid. Failed. Python. Fail. Ruby slight success? BASH scripts. Fail.

I’ve always found it hardest that I can learn to read these languages but not write them. Same with German.

Arduino? Yes please. GRBL for CNC and 3D printers? All right that’s more me.

I’ve found it’s very important for my brain to have something “real” involved with the programming. Making a servo move or an LED blink clicks in my brain way better than an programmatic output on the computer.

You can get a desktop CNC or 3D printer for just a few hundred bucks to get started with a learnable platform. Or an arduino starter kit for 50$.

Are you talking about indoors at home, or are you willing to go somewhere indoors? If so, you could pick up playing pool, darts, or bowling. They're all fun and you don't really have to be good at them to enjoy them.

I would try turning learning into a hobby. Think of all the subjects you want to know about, find people on YouTube who knows about them, and subscribe to them. If you want to know about game design, subscribe to game development and coding channels. There are passionate people covering every topic you can imagine trying to share their love for the subject, if you can find them. The more you learn, the easier it will be, and the more motivated you will be to try things.

Grab an Elegoo Arduino kit on Amazon and start there to get started on the coding journey! Follow Paul McWhorter's Arduino tutorials on YouTube. You can program the Arduino from knowing NOTHING about electronics and coding. He teaches you from square one as if you had zero knowledge. I'm on lesson 35 myself and it's addicting! Coding something yourself and watching it work is amazing! I've even used what he taught me to develop a temperature sensor for my house that helps alert me when the pipes underneath my house get too cold during the winter. It's going to help so much and be such a valuable machine.

I make board games and card games, and I've put several of them into Tabletop Simulator. It's on Steam and you don't have to know any coding. It's not super intuitive, but with some instructional youtube videos, I've managed. Its normally $20 but sometimes goes on sale for $10.

Sorry you're feeling down. I've been there.

I have a few friends who used to go to game jams, which are competitions where you or a group compete to make a video game in a set time frame. A lot of the people who went to them were programmers, but there were also artists, writers, musicians, etc. that participated as part of groups. If you have any interest or talent in things like that, there's other avenues to get involved in making games besides being a code monkey.

As far as actually learning to code, if you want to continue pursuing that, you may be jumping in too deep, you gonna learn to crawl before you can walk, and walk before you can run. Unless you're a real prodigy, you're probably not going to be able to make much of anything beyond a basic text-based game for months or years from starting to learn programming. Start small, basically every game dev or software developer out there started with a "hello world" program at some point that literally just prints those words on your screen and literally nothing else. There's a lot of options out there to learn from, but you need to start from somewhere and follow the whole track before you understand enough to make a game from scratch.

You may not have to start totally from scratch depending on what you want to get out of the experience, there are some games and tools that require little or no coding knowledge to do some pretty cool stuff with that you can play around with.

As far as non-video game stuff, I took up painting minis for my d&d games over COVID. I wouldn't consider myself to be an artsy person, but I'm doing alright. I started with the reaper minis learn to point kits. Even if you don't play tabletop games, it's a pretty fun hobby on its own. From there I started getting into gaslands, where you modify and paint hot wheels cars to use in the game. There's of course also traditional model kits you can do, and related hobbies like model railroading.

You can also get into cooking, I dabble in a lot of hobbies but if your goal is to show off, nothing gets a bigger reaction than something tasty.

Depending on how much workspace you have available and your tools and materials budget, you can also get into various types of woodworking, leatherwork, sewing, basket weaving, electronics, painting/drawing, writing, jewelry making, metalworking, fly tying (even if you don't fish yourself, they're pretty neat to look at,) making terrarium, the list goes on. Basically you just need to pick something you think is neat that you'd want to make and figure out how to do it.

Do you have a special interest?