I feel way ahead of the gamers, but far behind the game. Pun not intended (but cool how it worked out that way).

I have been experiencing a flux of them, and perhaps some of you have also. My main barriers are:

Information:

How do you make a game? That is the basic question. Lot's of resources. Can you learn that API? Can't program? Learn that first. Which language? Okay, now how do I do this...? Too hard, too basic, and incomplete tutorials.

Even when you go to school, a GOOD education can still be hard to find. Tuition. I go solo, and that is even more true me. So that brings me to the next barrier:

Money:

If you are broke and unemployed like me, you can't buy half the tools, resources, information, that you would "prefer." But people "have to make a living right?" I don't blame them either. They say it takes money to make money.

Skills:

No information and no money means you have to obtain that information the old school way. Trial and error? But I am broke now!

The main things that prevent me right now are information and skills. I am all free and open source right now. Blender, Godot, and finally a photo editor I can trust (sorry Gimp).

I am not a beginner, so to speak, so I posted it for discussion in the lounge.

What barriers do you, or have you experienced?

You can't buy skills

It is a shock to many people, but you actually have to work extremely hard to acquire them.

Shopping around for better tools is useless if you don't even know how to operate a simple hammer..

And even then, having worked hard to develop the skills, you also need talent.

And you can't buy that either. And you don't know if you've got the talent if you haven't put an awful lot of effort into acquiring those aforementioned skills.

But

there is no try. ;)

Trial and error?

In a nutshell: that is exactly how learning works.

Sure, trial and error is one way. But I never tried drugs to know I didn't want to do them. But in this case, time is of the essence, so I don't have enough time for trial and error.

Meanwhile I am working on methods to break down the barriers. I am working on a curriculum that runs about 3 hours and goes from absolutely no knowledge to competent enough knowledge to make a game you would play.

I may go 2d, but I want to go 3D. Of course I will be avoiding technical stuff like major 3d modeling, uv unwrapping, texturing etc. Just a little frustrated with figuring a way to make this a simple as possible.

A good artist can make beautiful art out of anything.

A bad artist blames his tools.

~ reworked quote "a bad workman always blames his tools"

All tools needed to program games, in all the major languages, are FREE . All you have to do is find the ones you like to use.

I am working on a curriculum that runs about 3 hours and goes from absolutely no knowledge to competent enough knowledge to make a game you would play.

.

It takes months to figure out how to (properly) use (most) game engines (that do not require much code/script) .

In 3 hours, you will somehow change this ?

It is possible to make a very basic choose your own adventure text game in Python with no knowledge in about 3 hours .... that is about it.

To answer your (kind of) question:

I use a 11 year old copy of Photoshop I bought for cheap ( works great ) ... everything else I use for programming is freeware.

Eclipse, QT, PyScripter , Notepad ++, and all the debugging & benchmarking software I have installed.

Heck, even my server software,WAMP, is free !

i like old photoshop too....


my barriers... jianghu and trauma, or, you, and me

the first:
every technologic industry i've participated in for the last 20 years has been extremely competitive, replete with "public perception management" agents eager to use any dirty trick to devalue the competition. the sad thing is that all the new entrants never believe you and walk into it, then five years later they're still working outside of their interests, but settled into a life of unfulfilled ambitions, with kids and a spouse so it's too late to do or change much.

the second:
twenty years of your "trial and error" method has left it's psychological shadow.. left to my own field, people celebrate me .. "amazing genius synthesizers" been said so many times... but if i ask how to use the vsk 2.4 sdk, i'm worse than pondscum.

after 20 years, there are still many facets of computing that i wouldn't know where to begin trying to find out. where do i find out how to use the vsk sdk with fclt? i don't know and i'm sure that i'll never know. year after year goes by, no one helps me, i can't help anyone. so i am happy doing my own thing (limitless until i run into an API or environment, which is "your thing" and endless cosmic suffering).

one thing i do know is that if you have spent solid years of your life trying to discern other peoples methods, it's like ramming your head into a stone mountain every day, and even if it doesn't leave a mark, whenever you see you have to start digging through someone else's crap, it can make me go a bit crosseyed.

then you read the first sentence...

what was the one i found yesterday?? this is a classic of the genre!

"Imagine you want to draw an orange. You can pick up a piece of stone and start drawing somewhere. If you draw on the floor, the next rain is likely to wipe your master piece away. If you draw on somebody's wall, you could face a law suit."

i'm unable to type after the link i posted because it becomes part of the link, so if you can parse that nonsequentially, i feel like this material does not say "i'd like to help people on the internet find out about this subject", this material says more to me "your time is not valuable, neither is your attention. you were probably focused on trying to accomplish something, but now i'd like you to focus on dying slowly under the weight of my vacuous prose".

i usually get so upset that this person disrespects the ambitions of others to deeply that i am unable to continue reading their poisonous bullcrap. petzold eg. seems particularly selected to be the "gateway" to windows becasuse of his ability to fill 1500 pages with insensibly long demo programs and asinine text.

that's from -

http://www.functionx.com/win32/Lesson10.htm

i feel like, "yes thank you, i have a previous understanding of pencils actually."

no one makes that mistake on purpose. that author is an assassin.

i feel like, "yes thank you, i have a previous understanding of pencils actually."

no one makes that mistake on purpose. that author is an assassin.

I think I'm beginning to understand why you have such a lot of trouble finding help. That actually seems to be a decent tutorial for a complete beginner (or was at least a decade ago, see below). Granted, the first section is a bit verbose, but it has an important point: it motivates the existence of something as counterintuitive as a device context.
It certainly is not a tutorial I would recommend. The design of the site looks ancient and while there are unfortunately no dates available on the individual tutorials one can guess that the Win32 one is at least very close to the "2004" claimed in the copyright (which does at least explain the design, although looking at it I would have guessed 'late nineties').

Still, if that was the absolutely only entry resource I had and I were of the mind to learn GDI, it still contains the most important bit: a reference to "BeginPaint", which when entered in a search engine of your choice leads straight to the official documentation which explains everything needed, has links to the other related functions and a few examples to get various things done.