Welcome to GDNet’s For Beginners discussion forum! If you’re new to game development looking for some help navigating the many choices and challenges of the field, this is the place for you. If you’re a seasoned pro looking to pass on some of your wisdom to the next generation, this is a great place to do it.

Additionally, please consider joining our Discord server to engage in real time with other game developers from our community.

There are some simple ground rules the moderation team enforces in this forum, in addition to GDNet’s general community guidelines:

1. For Beginners is a forum for all disciplines: programmers, artists, designers, composers, and everyone else. In other words, it’s not just programming questions that are acceptable here. Any questions from anyone who is just getting started in any aspect of game development are fair game.
2. The primary exception to the above are questions dealing with career advice: how to break into the industry professionally, what choices to make regarding school choices, and so on. Those belong in our Career Development forum.
3. This is place for beginners to ask questions and get answers. It’s not a place to post tutorials or articles, or links to tutorials or articles, that you think might be helpful to beginners. For that, you should use the Your Announcements forum.
4. If you’re a beginner posting a question in this forum, please try to include as much information about your problem as you can. Be very specific. Include the exact text of any error messages you are getting. If you’re a programmer including code, include the exact code. You are much more likely to get a good answer quickly this way.
5. If you are a grizzled veteran answering questions, please remember that even you were a neophyte once, and be particularly cognizant of the fact that the audience here may not have the years of experience you do. Try to be as precise, clear and forgiving in your responses as possible.
6. Please avoid derailing topics into tangential discussions of technical minutiae and subtle pros and cons. Topics that drift too far afield of the original poster’s query may be reigned in.
7. Please do not attempt to mark threads as “solved” or otherwise “closed” because you think the question has been answered. Sometimes there’s more than one side to a problem or solution, and we encourage discussion so long as it stays relevant to the original topic and to the experience level of the asker. “Solved” edits will be rolled back.
8. Do not "necro post," that is, reply to threads where the last post is a year or more prior. Doing so will result in a warning, and the deletion of your post.
9. Be nice, respect your fellow members, and remember that we can usually all learn something from somebody else.