Trouble Creating Own Ideas with Blueprints

I don’t know if this happens to others, but I have an extremely difficult time creating anything outside of a tutorial. I can follow the tutorials fine and make everything the tutorial requires, but as soon as I try to create my own game I can’t even take the first step.

Right now I want to create an extremely simple game - but I don’t even know how to start. The game would have a machine that I could trigger via a lever and would spit out a persons name that is in a list I have imported (preferably from .csv file). It would be cool if it had some kind of spinning slot machine type animation on the machine as well, but right now I can’t even get it to function with Print String.

What game blueprints would be required to make something like this. My initial thought was to create a database with a .csv and then somehow add that to an array and choose at random…but I can’t even get that to work.

What are the first steps people take to even try to get something like this to become a reality?

What I always do when I’m brainstorming a new project or tackling an unfamiliar task is to break it down.

Every software/game you develop is a series of problems that needs to be solved. Some problems can be solved easily, some are harder, and some even create new problems as you try and solve them.

Those problems are always solved in steps in a procedural way. For example; One step of a bigger problem would be to solve the smaller problem of loading a CSV file into the game, which has its own steps.

There’s nothing wrong with doing tutorials to solve your problems. This is a necessary step in skill and knowledge building, and for you is a part of formulating your step-by-step problem-solving process.

NEVER feel bad about seeking knowledge, that is a sign that you’re wanting to improve, and that’s a wonderful skill and attribute to have in a developer.

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