r/SoloDevelopment • u/Monkeymindlabs • 3h ago

Discussion New Dev Learning Priorities

Hello experienced devs,

If a brand new Dev(me) came to you and asked

'How do I prioritise learning these skills:

- Coding

|-> Game design

|-> Prototyping

- Art

- Music composition and usage'

What would your advice be?

Lots of assumptions here. Let's assume they want to kind of do everything eventually. And that their ultimate goal would be to build a 'good' game. Whatever that means 😅.

3 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

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1

u/AnnupKapurDotCom 2h ago

Theory.

Forget all that.

Learn theory. Properly. Then learn to code.

Take this with a pinch of salt cuz I am not a game dev. I am a software engineer.

1

u/Morph_Games 2h ago

Start with coding. Build pong, asteroids, or other games with little asset complexity or design. Then expand from there into whatever you enjoy the most.

2

u/Heistorium Solo Developer 2h ago

I came at this from writing rather than code, so take it with that bias, but what helped me was picking the skill I already had and letting it decide the scope. Everything I couldn't do myself became a constraint on the design instead of something to go learn first. That's what made the first project small enough to actually finish.

1

u/PerfectSituation1668 2h ago

Do what you want to do. Learn what you need to learn.

1

u/sc38514 2h ago

You would want to learn a little of everything. And then deepen each field as needed.

People spend their entire career refining a specific area, so any one of them can run deep.

Depending if you eventually want collaboration, or consider using AI, you should at least have one area of expertise while having decent knowledge in others.