Game Development for Complete Beginners

[Serapth]

Cheers All, I run the site GameFromScratch.com, which among other things contains a number of game development tutorials. Over the last five years I have never done a series from the very beginning, targeting the prospective programmer that has exactly ZERO prior game programming, or for that matter, programming programming... experience.

The reason I am mentioning it here is I have chosen to use Lua and Love as the language and library respectively. The reasons why should be obvious to the majority of you; Lua is an intuitive, "simple" but useful language while Love is a powerful, comprehensive but easy to learn game engine.

The series is pretty early on, but the playlist is available here. The size of that series will be expanding massively in a short order. I also put together a quick roundup of Love/Lua editor/IDE packages available here.

To the beginners, I hope this proves a useful resource. To the experts, please let me know if I make a mistake or if you have a suggestion... by the nature of what I do, I work in dozens of languages across many more game engines, so I am certainly prone to get my wires crossed on more than one occasion!

EDIT -- Progress so far. In two categories, the "main" series, these tutorials all assume you've watched the prior tutorial, and the "optional" section, generally linked from the main tutorials for more information if desired. These don't strictly need to be understood, but contain useful information:

Main Series




Optionals

[ivan]

Welcome to the forums. I've seen your videos on Youtube so good job there.
Keep it up, I'm sure people will learn a lot from those tutorials.

[s-ol]

Nice! A lot of people have been asking for something like this so I hope it turns out as good as it sounds right now
Will be linking people here if it does

[Serapth]

Nice! A lot of people have been asking for something like this so I hope it turns out as good as it sounds right now
Will be linking people here if it does

Here's hoping it turns out to be good then!

[bobbyjones]

I think the best thing to do would post here after each tutorial for feedback. Generally a lot of people who make tutorials teach poor coding practices that the general community dislikes or practices that would cause people a lot of issue when expanding. For example whether or not globals should be used

[Serapth]

I think the best thing to do would post here after each tutorial for feedback. Generally a lot of people who make tutorials teach poor coding practices that the general community dislikes or practices that would cause people a lot of issue when expanding. For example whether or not globals should be used

I would certainly be willing to do this, especially once I get into more code focused tutorials, but would it be considered spammy?

[s-ol]

I think the best thing to do would post here after each tutorial for feedback. Generally a lot of people who make tutorials teach poor coding practices that the general community dislikes or practices that would cause people a lot of issue when expanding. For example whether or not globals should be used

I would certainly be willing to do this, especially once I get into more code focused tutorials, but would it be considered spammy?

definetely not if you keep it in one thread. Or are you going to make three videos each day?

[SiENcE]

@Serapth Welcome! Nice you are here.

I strongly suggest a subForum for LÖVE tutorials or at least a Tutorial section beside the Examples on the main site.

[AC Vis]

I think bobbyjones makes a good suggestion. You're most likely going to be able to find the best feedback on your videos in a forum l like this. Youtube can be hit-or-miss and you're mostly going to get questions or asked for help, but on here you may get feedback on how to improve or things to mention in future videos.

Also, I agree with SiENcE's suggestion. Tutorials don't quite fit in General or in Support/Development and sometimes get lost. A sub-forum could possibly encourage their production and increase their visibility.

[Serapth]

I think bobbyjones makes a good suggestion. You're most likely going to be able to find the best feedback on your videos in a forum l like this. Youtube can be hit-or-miss and you're mostly going to get questions or asked for help, but on here you may get feedback on how to improve or things to mention in future videos.

Also, I agree with SiENcE's suggestion. Tutorials don't quite fit in General or in Support/Development and sometimes get lost. A sub-forum could possibly encourage their production and increase their visibility.

Alright, Ill update this thread as I add new videos, and assuming I can edit (or eventually can edit) the main post, I'll create a running table of contents.

I've added a couple more videos, I'm mostly covering optional ground work stuff right now... things you dont *need* to know to continue, but you really should.