Why Game Dev Tutorials Will Poison Your Progress

We've all used game dev tutorials in an attempt to learn how to become a game developer. They're such a valuable source of information... but are they?

Why Game Dev Tutorials Will Poison Your Progress

Game developers who share tutorials on how to make games are not evil. They have good intentions. The problem is that Game Development is not as easy as just a few tutorials. Most of those who follow these tutorials will follow along with step-by-step only to forget everything they learned along the way. They then become dependent on game dev tutorials in order to develop their games. Learning this way is known as "inauthentic learning" and simply means that you remember it whilst it's needed but will forget 95% of the information once it's no longer needed. These are just some of the reasons why Game Deve tutorials will ruin your life.

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[DanCreaMundos]

The problem is looking for specific tutorials, what you need is tutorials about how to use your engine, not how to make a game.

[dodgepickle]

Using tutorials is not a bad thing for newbie developers; they can serve as a reference for how to solve a specific problem. If you use an external library for animation, calculating, or even an engine to complete your game, then using a tutorial can also save you time. It's always about how you use it in the progress; there's a fine line between reinventing the wheel and perceiving deep knowledge.

[checkerbene]

To discourage beginners to start their journey with simple tutorials is just horrible. By learning from examples you can grow and start to understand why the tutorial was made that way. Motivation is also a huge factor as many will be happy to see something work quickly and change it to their designs, and not have to search through comment sections of small games on a game jam. If you start by taking programming courses or doing only theoretical research instead of just starting to build, it might just kill of the motivation and many might stop just there...

[Uchidan]

This video summed up: Here are the tools to create glass. Good luck! What? You want to be taught how? No, that will poison your progress in learning how to make glass. Have fun! What's that? You'll probably give up really quickly because you have no idea what you are doing? Oh, that's too bad. Well, I suggest checking out GlassDev and touch some different types of glass, that will for sure help you know how to create your own glass right? No? Well, I guess you can maybe watch someone online who will show you EXACTLY how to make glass you want to make step by step, and then find other videos that will help you add to your existing glass, thus making the ACTUAL glass you want. BUT ultimately that is a BAD idea because then your glass won't be sturdy enough if you just watch videos. So, really you should just stumble around in the dark for a LONG LONG time until you magically know what you are doing because remember....glass making is hard....

[ordonineonline]

I never used feature specific tutorial as far as i can remember. If you are genuinely interested in game dev, you should explore the tools available to you (such as learning classes, objects, game engine insight), not what you CAN do. It will benefit you more to learn why and how popular features were made than to copy them. That in turn, will also will also allow you to innovate and make THE game you invisioned. Right now my challenge is actually finishing a game and then publisbing it :)

[thracco]

Looking at the top game jam games I think is discouraging for a beginner because these games are usually made from veteran indies or professional coders that do games in their free time. Although there are some beginner game jams.

[lennysmileyface]

This is why I loved ThinMatrix's OpenGL tutorials since he doesn't show you how to make a game but the process and explanation of how and why you do things to build a game engine. This gave me a deeper understanding of how they work in general. I implemented my own systems on top of what I learned so it made me able to more easily use another engine and gave me a good understanding of syntax and logic. The only tutorials I watch are about a specific engine feature use.

[xgamesstuff]

I won't say Game Dev tutorials will poison your progress. This "tutorial hell" is Level 1 GameDev where surface level knowledge matters and everything seems like copy and paste, they are great at getting a person with 0 experience in game dev or a specific feature off the ground. At that point, the developer should know what he/she wants. If you feel discouraged, then your experience is telling you to go another level. Level 2 GameDev is where design philosophy, code architecture, critical thinking, art style/direction matters. Try to understand what are problems in the project and design solutions around them. Once you mastered them, you are a technically a senior.

Everyone has to go through Level 1 GameDev to reach Level 2 GameDev. Don't need to feel bad about it, you are not alone, we all been through there. Just enjoy the process, level up and have fun. :)

[OHTASISAN]

What people have to remember is that something is better than nothing in most cases. If you're out of shape and want to get fit, anything that gets you moving more than you did before will get you results. Sure you should be aware of certain things as you improve such as proper form and having a routine that you follow, but remember that all of those things are there to support your primary goal. You can get MORE fit with improper form and a haphazard routine but you can't get MORE fit without working out at all. Injury prevents consistency, just as having no routine might. Only insecure people will laugh at another for mistakes. Now extrapolating that over to general game development, sitting there for days and weeks looking for the best way to do things is ultimately worse than starting. People say that adults have a harder time learning than children and while that might be true from a physiological standpoint, the bigger issue at hand is that as people get older, they become burdened by knowledge. Everything becomes a management of resources. "Is this going to be right for me? What's the fastest/best way to do XYZ? Can I make money out of this?" Kids on the other hand just do things because it's fun. If you truly enjoy something you will master it. It's going to be hard to shake habits and fears but trust the process. Whether it's random tutorials or reading documentation or taking formal lessons, all you have to do is start and stick with it. Completing a flawed tutorial is still more valuable than quitting a Masterclass.

[HRforges]

Why try and reinvent the wheel though?

Why am sitting here figuring out how to code a 3rd person camera when it's already been solved dozens of times over. Unless I want to do something different with the 3rd person camera that requires me doing it all myself, there is no reason not to follow in others footsteps.

We all stand on the backs of giants, take advantage of that. Yes you should learn how to use the tools you are using, but you shouldn't ignore solved issues. You should learn how to take the solution and adapt it to your project, how you can modify it if need be. But like I said, reinventing the wheel is just dumb.

[DylanDev]

I'd argue that tutorials are a crucial step in learning game development without a technical computer science background. Documentation can be incredibly scary. As someone who started in tutorial purgatory but slowly learned how to problem solve for themselves, without tutorials I would not be where I am today, making a multiplayer game completely using documentation and my brain. Tutorials give you the tools you need but the only way to improve is to take what you learn and apply it.

[areallyboredindividual]

The way out of that tutorial trap for me was learning the fundamentals of programming in order to understand enough to attempt to make my own mechanics unassisted. From there, keep trying and failing and eventually you'll know the pitfalls to avoid and good habits to get into early in your project

[martinchya]

In the other hand, if you are experieced tutorials (I've around 20 years of programming experience), then those "tutorials for newbies" are actually great. Like, I was making some sort of inventory system in my game and I did not know how to implement drag&drop in unity. A 10min tutorial got me enough to make fully featured inventory system by myself.

Other example is how to make objects glow in 2D Unity game. Brackeys tutorial was enough for me to get the concept about it being just HDR colors on scene with Bloom post processing effect and I've integrated the tutorial concept as a part of my master shader.

Its just a shortcut for documentation and using it this way is great. The weird thing is however, I think they are more helpful to experienced developers that do not know Unity than begginners.

[manavroy]

Started my game development journey at 1 January 2023.
Wasted my 3-4 months on reading complicated books, Following tutorials(Which was very annoying to copy paste code everytime..)
Now, For the past 2 weeks, I'm working on pong game and this is what the real fun and learning is, Basically creating something with your own logic then copy's someone...
Now I'm really enjoying game programing with sfml...

[Camobiwon]

Great video. I've been doing game dev for a few years now and it is even my fulltime job. I don't think there is any specific route that someone can follow to success, but it is absolutely true that you cannot just only watch tutorials for all of your core features and expect it to work out. I've seen many people struggle with that and it never works out for them.

[REDFLECTED]

This is so underrated. Good video! You earned a sub.

[SneakyKittyGameDev]

As one of these tutorial channels (a small one cause C++ master race), your spot on (granted I have a few playlists on optimization XD). Tutorials should be used to get familiar with something, a starting point. The problem ends up being (more often than not) people using those tutorials and basically copy/pasting from them without learning anything or being able to apply that "skill" elsewhere. For example you want to learn UI so you watch a tutorial on how to make a main menu. Anyone with the ability to self learn will use what they learned from that tutorial to make a HUD and other types of UI, but most will only see it as "now I only know how to make a main menu and cant do anything else, let me lookup how to make a HUD even though its the same process". I have this problem specifically with covering the Online Subsystem in Unreal. It's all an interface so the functions, delegates, and other variables are all the same between platforms, yep people still cant figure it out without handholding going between platforms

[GreenBlueWalkthrough]

I all the creative stuff I do my number 1 rule with tutorials are... Never follow them exactly but listen to them and reference them while making something of your own.
Like Pixel art/RPG maker/Synth music/Writing tutorial people are really good with remembering that is their place not to expressly make a step by step guide but to teach the program/methods. So yeah this is a major problem in creative circles thanks for covering it!

[djrmarketing]

I wrote my first games typed in from magazines on Commodore and DOS. And it's a huge jump today to go from something then to something now. But I think it's important beyond tutorials to understand the core components of a game - your objects (the NPCs, Player, Items etc), building them with good design patterns (Object becomes Item becomes Weapon, etc Object->Character->Player etc). Then once you've mastered the basics, adding in things like input loops, etc. One of the biggest things I've seen in my journey over the years from making games then, Turbo Pascal, C, later C#, Flash, Unity, Godot, etc is realizing that optimization is HUGE. You could have 250-1000 objects on the level, badly optimized, and your game runs poorly. But by using object inheritance, you could easily have a function added to the most basic object that says "IsVisible" that turns off a bunch of checks and suddenly your game performance is fantastic.. You also have multi-threading, and stuff like that too. It's not as big of an issue today on fast desktop PC's but mobile games, if you want to have compatibility that's not just "the latest 2 flagship phones", you will have optimize EVERYTHING.

[AwataraGame]

I'm 3 years solo developer without basic programming, I get a lot of information from other developer tutorial, so I agree that they aren't poison if you can modified their code.