Do I need to be good at programming to make a game?

What level of programming knowledge do I need to create games? What C # skills do I need? I’m bad with classes, can it hurt me when it comes to making my games?

I think you’d like it very much if you knew the beginner & intermediate sections covered at this link: Learn game development w/ Unity | Courses & tutorials in game design, VR, AR, & Real-time 3D | Unity Learn
That will help you do a lot, as well as understand a lot of other things.

You could copy code, use something like the 3d package unity released, visual scripting, or work with another person(s) who know how to code. Copying code for fundamental things, beyond helping you to learn, is probably not a great avenue, though.

I’m not sure what “bad with classes” means.

2 Likes

There is a lot you can do with beginner level C# skills. For simple games you don’t necessarily need to deal with your own custom C# classes, since most of what you will be doing will be accessing Monobehaviors attached to gameobjects. You’ll want to get good at finding and managing references between scripts and objects though. You’ll also want to get good at using simple loops, and dealing with arrays and lists. Just with those skills you can take on a lot of fairly simple Unity projects.

More advanced projects will necessitate more advanced skills.

1 Like

It also depends on what you mean by programming. The most important programming skill is thinking in a logical and organized manner, much more important than knowing any given programming language. Just look at PlayMaker’s showcase page. Some of those games also use traditional text-based scripting, but some of them use only visual scripting.

1 Like

If you’re bad with something then you just need to go and learn about it properly and figure out exactly what it is so that you can use it correctly. Lately I’ve found my knowledge quite lacking when it comes to booleans the concept is simple enough but I struggle to apply them in my code. I’m not going to give up though I’m simply going to look up a ton of videos and tutorials on the subject so I make sure I understand them correctly.

That’s all you need to do with classes, learn what they are from the absolute basics, their terminology and how they’re applied in programming.

1 Like

(imo) an Intermediate knowledge of C# would be a minimum. However, you can also argue “none at all” if you’re making something very basic. I feel that’s disingenuous though and that, in general, a moderate understanding of programming will open up so many opportunities that aren’t there for “drag and drop” or “copy/paste” methods of development.

erm, C# skills? that’s not really how it works. You should know the basics of programming (and those related to C#) so classes, methods, if/else statements etc. Unity has a ton of scripting tutorials from “my nan could probably do this” to “that’s it. I quit being a developer. This is too frustrating”.

Yes. without a good knowledge of programming you will be stuck making basic games forever (move the cube left and right to pickup spheres and gain points). Even if you stitch together some kind of amalgamation from the asset store, you’ll have no idea how it works, how to modify it, or what to do when something breaks of you encounter bugs (or you try to optimise).

as methos5k pointed out, Unity has a large section dedicated to programming and covers a wide variety of topics from shooting, to persistent data, to basic game mechanics (Game Menus, handling data, spawning enemies etc)
I think if you did every single one (some of them are fairly complex like the persistent data tutorial) you should have a very good base knowledge and you just expand from there.

1 Like

“A game” is pretty broad. No you don’t need programming skills to create any game. However if you have a specific game design in mind, then you may need to program it. And either way, being able to program a game will make it a lot easier to make a game.

1 Like

There are tutorial games in the learn section, so you can basically start writing games right away. It’s a good way to learn. Make small changes to them and add your own graphics.

1 Like