When Does it All Click? (Or, Mind of a Engineer, or Debugger?)

[Prescott_Locceheede]

Hi, Prescott here. I am enrolled in the unreal course, obviously, and I had a question: When does it all click?? I’ve coded games before but never from scratch and they were usually the 2D RPG type games with the code built in and me knowing where to put what. Kind of like this course is for me.

But when does it all make so much sense that I can just make something in C++ or Unreal that is a game through code? Maybe I’m not far enough in the course, I’m at the if statements in C++ part, haven’t even touched Unreal yet. But like I said, I’ve coded on my own older engines, like RPG Maker and an old school game called Graal Online. But every time we get to the part where it is like “Do this on your own.” my mind goes blank and I can’t even figure out what it is I need to put even though it should be obvious. Is this the mind of a debugger? Cause it doesn’t feel like a from scratch engineer. I hope this makes sense. Anyone else feel like this or do you just have the answer to the problem as you are looking at it. Maybe when I’m done, I take a break and go over the course again. Things aren’t clicking but I feel like I know what I’m doing…

[dratone]

I don’t think there is really an answer to “When will it click” besides “It’ll click when it clicks”

Everybody is different in that regard and everybody learns at a different rate.
It does help to have other programming experience but from what I know of things like RPG Maker etc (I don’t have any personal experience with it, so this is just my interpretation of what I’ve heard) they don’t really help in this regard. They dumb things down to such a degree that you don’t really learn a lot from it. (Again, not personal experience, just what i’ve heard).

To be honest, programming is more a state of mind then a skill in my opinion. Yes, you need a certain amount of knowledge before you can start from scratch, but it is also seeing the patterns and a fair bit of experience.

Once you’ve learned the method calls and execution flow of c++ its really important to also get a feel for it.

Just start experimenting. What happens if I do this or that. Try to form hypothesis of how something could work. Test it works the way you thought and, possibly even more important - try to disprove your hypothesis. yes thats the “scientific method” but in my experience it works just aswel in programming. Failure is often more teaching then success.

If you can’t do the actual challenges try to at least form a theory as to how it could be done. What would you need to complete the challenge? Is all the information (variables) you need already present? Or do you need to fetch it from somewhere or just define it? Can you access the right part of the program or is it restricted?

Try to form these theories and patterns in your head and then see if what you thought of matches reality.

[Dimitris_Chloupis]

Nope Prescott you make zero sense I am afraid.

Your assumption that you will magically become able to make games from scratch in Unreal with a handful of video tutorials is illogical to say the least.

This is nothing more than introduction, you will have to do it like the rest of us, sit down and practice a lot the skills you learn in these tutorials and then carry on the learning process by yourself.

You don’t need a mind that is not blank to make games, a mind that is blank will do just fine. I am coding for over 30 years now and 99% of the time I have no clue what I am doing because I am always doing or trying something new. I don’t see any value on doing things I am familiar with anyway, plus its no fun.

Last week I have been learning how to share memory between 2 processes made in different programming languages. That means I had to go very low level inside the OS kernel, and find a core memory managing function called mmap (sort for memory mapping). Its what the OS uses to load DLLs and do many other stuff. Suffice to say I had no clue what I was doing. I just copied an example I found online and I was literally printing (printf()) bytes and disassembling machine code. Last time I worked as low level was 20 years ago. However those prints and endless testing executables show me the details that documentation would not show and I was able after days of really sad efforts to finally accomplish my goal.

Of course as always it made me wonder how simple it was and yet how much time it took me to learn it. Of course now its simple because I know how to make it work. So you can say simplicity is certainly relative.

Thats life, huge, complex and impossible to fathom and never ending learning process.

Your blank mind is fine, keep learning , testing and experimenting and you will be fine. You don’t need special genes, special IQ or special anything to make games in Unreal.

The only thing you need is not giving up and keep trying until you make things work no matter how many times you will fail.

But then this is how life works I am afraid.

If you need inspiration, just take a look at a baby learning how to walk. A seemingly doomed effort , of never ending colliding of the face with the floor. Its painful physically and emotionally to watch.

But baby are morons, actually the word “moron” comes out of the Greek word “moros” which also comes from the word “moro” which means “baby”. So to say that a baby is acting like a moron, literally means to say that a baby acts like a baby.

Baby and kids are morons because they don’t know when to give up. Apparently that makes them great learner. Its like kid that annoy you with a never ending amount of questions today, tomorrow will be showing you how to code in Assembly.

For a kid , there is no challange, difficult , boredom and exhaustion. There is just fun and endless curiosity.

So be a “moron” like I am , and you will see how much easier things will become. Have fun and stop worrying about the result. The rest will come by itself.

Oh sorry I forgot with all this bumbling to answer your question.

When it all clicks ?

Never.

Be glad it never does, thats what makes life fun