You’re sitting there, staring at a blank screen or a crumpled piece of notebook paper, and the thought hits you: I want to build something. Not just anything, but a world people can inhabit. But then the wall hits. How do you make games when you aren’t a math wizard or a trust fund baby with twenty years of C++ experience? It feels like trying to climb Everest in flip-flops. Honestly, most people start by overcomplicating the hell out of it. They think they need a "Grand Theft Auto" budget or a team of thirty artists in a sleek Austin studio. They don't.
Making games is actually just a series of very small, often annoying, logical puzzles. You solve one, you get a reward, you move to the next. It's less about "coding" in the way Hollywood portrays it—green text scrolling down a black screen—and more about understanding how to talk to a machine so it doesn't crash when a player presses the "A" button.
The Engine Myth and Picking Your Weapons
Everyone argues about engines. Unity, Unreal, Godot, GameMaker. It’s like watching people argue over Ford vs. Chevy when they don’t even have a driver’s license yet. If you want to know how do you make games in the modern era, you have to realize the engine is just a toolbox.
If you want high-end graphics that look like a movie, you go Unreal Engine 5. It’s heavy, it’s powerful, and the Nanite technology is genuinely sorcery. But if you're a solo dev? Unreal might bury you under its own weight. Unity is the middle child—reliable, huge community, but currently recovering from some PR nightmares regarding their pricing models. Then there's Godot. It’s open-source, lightweight, and growing faster than a weed in a sidewalk crack.
Don't spend three months picking. Pick one today. If you hate it, switch in a week. The logic of "if player hits wall, stop movement" is the same everywhere.
The "Minimum Viable Product" Trap
You’ve probably heard of an MVP. In the world of game dev, your MVP usually sucks. And that’s fine.
One of the biggest mistakes beginners make is trying to build the "Dream Game" first. Your Dream Game is a graveyard. It’s where motivation goes to die because you realized halfway through that implementing a multiplayer inventory system is actually a nightmare that requires understanding network latency and packet loss.
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Start with a ball.
Make the ball move. Make the ball jump. Make the ball change color when it touches a square. That is a game. Eric Barone spent years making Stardew Valley, but he didn't start by building a 100-hour RPG; he started by trying to clone the basic mechanics of Harvest Moon to see if he could even do it.
What Most People Get Wrong About Design
Game design isn't "having ideas." Ideas are cheap. Ideas are the easy part of the morning before the coffee kicks in. Real design is documentation and systems.
When you ask how do you make games that actually feel good to play, you're talking about "game feel" or "juice." This is the stuff that isn't strictly necessary but makes the experience. Screenshake when an explosion happens. A slight pause (hitstop) when a sword connects with an enemy. Particles flying everywhere.
Vlambeer, the studio behind Nuclear Throne, famously gave a talk about "art of screenshake." They showed how a boring, static shooter becomes visceral just by adding a few frames of lag and a camera wobble. You aren't building a simulation; you're building a trick for the human brain.
The Coding Hurdle (It’s Not That Bad)
Visual scripting exists. Tools like Blueprints in Unreal or Bolt in Unity let you drag boxes and connect them with lines. It’s basically digital LEGO.
Does it make you "not a real coder?" Who cares. If the game runs and people have fun, the "purity" of your C# scripts doesn't matter. Eventually, you’ll hit a wall where visual scripting becomes a messy spiderweb, and you’ll want to write code because it’s cleaner. That's the natural progression.
- Logic first: If X happens, do Y.
- Syntax second: Learning where the semicolons go.
- Optimization third: Making it run at 60fps on a potato.
Assets: You Don’t Have to Draw Everything
I can’t draw a straight line with a ruler. If I had to make my own art, my games would look like a toddler’s fever dream.
The "Asset Store" is your best friend and your worst enemy. You can buy 3D models, music, and sound effects for a few bucks. Sites like Itch.io have thousands of free "asset packs." The trap is "asset flipping"—where you just buy a bunch of stuff, throw it in a scene, and call it a game.
The secret is cohesive art direction. You can use cheap assets if you apply a consistent shader or lighting setup so they look like they belong together. Phasmophobia famously used many store-bought assets in its early days, but the gameplay loop was so terrifyingly good that nobody cared the house models were generic.
The Brutal Reality of Scope Creep
Scope creep is the silent killer. You start making a racing game. Then you think, "Hey, it would be cool if the driver could get out of the car." Now you’re making a third-person shooter. "And what if he could buy houses?" Now you’re making The Sims.
Stop it.
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Cut your features in half. Then cut them in half again. If your game is about jumping, make the jumping feel incredible. Don't add a crafting system just because every other game has one. If the crafting doesn't make the jumping better, it's trash. Toss it.
Testing: Your Friends Are Liars
When you show your game to your mom or your best friend, they will tell you it’s great. They are lying to you because they love you.
You need strangers.
You need to sit someone down, give them the controller, and shut up. Don't tell them what to do. If they can't figure out how to open the first door, your level design is bad. If they get bored after two minutes, your "core loop" isn't engaging. It’s painful to watch someone struggle with your creation, but it’s the only way to learn.
The Sound of Music (and Footsteps)
Audio is 50% of the experience. Play Dead Space on mute and it’s a goofy game about stomping space zombies. Play it with headphones in a dark room and you'll lose your mind.
You don't need a symphony orchestra. Use Bfxr for retro sounds. Use a microphone and a bag of potato chips to record "crunching" footsteps. Sound gives weight to the world. Without it, your game feels like a floating, ghostly hallucination.
Marketing Is Part of Development
If a game falls in the woods and no one is there to Steam-wishlist it, does it make a profit?
No.
You should be talking about your game the moment you have a square moving on a screen. Twitter (X), TikTok, Reddit—find your "sub-genre" community. Show the bugs. People love seeing the "behind the scenes" disasters. Development is a story, and the more people feel invested in your struggle, the more likely they are to buy the finished product.
The Finish Line Is a Mirage
A game is never "finished," it’s just "released."
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There will always be bugs. There will always be one more feature. You have to be disciplined enough to say "this is done." Shipping a small, polished game is 100x better for your career and mental health than having a "massive project" that sits on your hard drive for five years and never sees the light of day.
Actionable Next Steps to Start Today
Don't go back to YouTube for another six-hour tutorial. Do this instead:
- Download an Engine: Grab Godot or Unity right now. Don't think, just download.
- The 24-Hour Challenge: Try to make a "clone" of a dead-simple game like Pong or Flappy Bird in 24 hours. No fancy art, just shapes.
- Join a Game Jam: Go to Itch.io and find a "Game Jam" starting soon. These are 48-hour or week-long competitions that force you to finish something under a deadline. It's the best way to learn.
- Keep a DevLog: Even if it's just a private Discord server or a notebook. Write down what you fixed today. Progress is invisible unless you track it.
- Focus on the Loop: Define your game in one sentence. "You jump over saws to get a key." If that one sentence isn't fun, no amount of 4K textures will save you.
Making games is a marathon through a swamp. It's messy, you'll get stuck, and you'll want to quit. But the moment you see someone else play your game—and they actually smile, or get frustrated in the right way—it's a high you can't get anywhere else. Stop wondering how it's done and go break some code.