As I’ve tried to expand on existing projects I often run into things like circular dependencies and state management issues which require me rearchitecting some major pieces of the code. I have to imagine there are basic approaches you can take in the early phases that reduce the likelihood of encountering these problems.
I also have to imagine some of these approaches are overkill when you are just trying to get started. I know you don’t want to refactor things too early. But I also know some stuff is just good practice. But I don’t really know which is which
I don’t know if this is its own course or if it fits in with the game design course I suggested. Some key topics I’m interested in are:
scene management
saving and loading
examples of using interfaces and dependency injection to avoid problems you expect to have in the future (maybe because its in your design doc!)
As a professional game developer I can tell you, the most common mistake beginners make is starting to code before planning, that’s the root cause of many of the issues you describe, like circular dependencies or racing problems which are a nightmare to debug. Basically, if you do a great pre-production work, you’ll solve 90% or your problems, unless you start adding things after the production started, which is the second most common mistake beginners make, and don’t get me wrong, is not that you shouldn’t do that, people at Nintendo even have a phrase for that; “Upend the tea table”, but those are incredible game developers, you shouldn’t mimic that until you get enough experience.
Thanks both of you. You both pointed me to the RPG course. I should add that I’m not an engineer - I studied CS 20 some odd years ago so some of the concepts come quickly and some just require more practical experience before it clicks for me. I’ll add that I’m familiar with the basics of all those things (scene management, interfaces). It’s just that as my project gets larger, various parts of the code interact in surprising ways. This leads me to believe I don’t understand the tools quite well enough to make proper use of them.
So perhaps the RPG course has the complexity I’m looking for that can address what I’ve been running into. Or at least it has more examples, which will be beneficial for me.
Not necessarily requesting them all lol ! But I imagine GameDevTV looks at the ones with the highest engagement…. So let’s see what resonates with the crowd!
I actually found this kitchen game first and then I saw his TBS course and decided to take that instead. Just completed! Great course!! My skill jumped multiple levels after that course.
Yes I know what you mean. I added scene management into a code base that wasn’t designed for it and ran into all sorts of issues. I figured them out, but it got me thinking how important it is to have a lot of experience with both coding and with game design.
I’ve worked with engineers like that and yeah it’s quite amazing!
I guess we will see what the community likes, I hope that one of your ideas becomes a course, I’m pretty sure I commented on the one I felt strongly about.
The scope of the game you’ll end up making is quite large, is not even comparable to any other game you’ll make in any other course on this site, you’ll learn how to structure larger projects and the issues you’ll come up with while staying true to the SOLID principles. If you like the TBS course, you’ll love the RPG series, Sam, the instructor, is the best programmer I’ve had the honor to meet.
As for Game Design, well… that’s an entirely different topic, I haven’t seen a single good course on game design, all of them just tackle the basics and don’t give any opportunity to put things into practice.
Ok. I’m sold. I’ll do that after my mobile dev course. I am slowly realizing just how comprehensive the RPG course is.
Is there at least spot on the forum I can ask general questions? For example if I share a snippet of my written game design and a very high level tech design, is there a place where I can get feedback if my tech design is a good way of solving the problem. This maybe? Other Courses - GameDev.tv
Unfortunately there’s no such section, but I’ve used the Unity section to post about projects I developed using that engine. You could do the same, you could also join the discord server.
