I been programming for a while now and I’m ready to make my first game but all my game ideas end up being really hard and to ambitious so I was wondering what the best thing is to make as a first game that will get me more familiar with unity and wont be to ambitious so I don’t give up on it?
My recommended progression for learning game development remains fairly consistent:
- Tic-Tac-Toe → Tetris → Pac-Man → Simple Platformer
Each of these games introduces essential skills needed for game development:
- Tic-Tac-Toe: This serves as an introduction to programming with Unity and helps you get familiar with the basics of the editor.
- Tetris: Teaches input handling, making a basic UI, pausing/unpausing, basic movement, basic physics, rendering, handling visual effects and sound effects, and saving high scores. If you’re feeling ambitious, you can also implement game state saving.
- Pac-Man: Introduces pathfinding, enemy behavior, basic map building, animation, and managing game states, such as switching between the ghosts chasing the player and the player hunting the ghosts after eating a power pellet. Additionally, Pac-Man’s AI is entirely deterministic; each ghost has a specific “personality” that dictates how it chases the player. You can find detailed breakdowns online.
- Simple Platformer: Combines everything you’ve learned so far while adding scrolling and handling multiple scenes plus different player states and different animations in each state. If you’re feeling ambitious, you can add stats to the player that change through the gameplay.
Not only will this progression teach you fundamental game development concepts, but each project will also give you a better sense of how much time different game features take to implement. You’ll discover which aspects you excel at and which ones require more research and effort.
Lots of ideas in this thread, but the important part is to:
- make something
- make anything
- MAKE IT TODAY!
Stop making excuses!
Thank you for the recommendations