u/CertainToe6776

I’ve been thinking about why so many people struggle to make progress with game development.

A lot of it seems to come down to how people approach learning. It’s easy to fall into a cycle of tutorials and feel like you’re improving, but when you try to build something on your own, it doesn’t really translate.

At the same time, jumping straight into making something without enough foundation can feel overwhelming pretty quickly.

What seems to work better is a mix of both, learning just enough to get started, then actually building small projects and repeating that process.

Curious how others approached it, did you lean more toward courses first, or just start building?

I’ve been digging into why so many people (myself included at times) struggle to make real progress with game development.

It doesn’t seem to be about intelligence or even effort. The pattern I keep seeing is that most beginners treat it like a series of tutorials instead of a skill to build.

You can spend weeks following along with videos and feel productive, but nothing really sticks because you're not making decisions yourself.

What seems to help more is:

• building very small projects instead of big ideas
• repeating simple mechanics until they click
• accepting that progress feels slow at first

Once I shifted toward that, things started to make more sense.

Curious if others experienced the same or struggled with different things?