Hello my name is Erik Reis i'm 15 and i just got into game development. I don't want to spend hundreds of bucks on online classes i just want someone to help me. Kinda like a mentor or another new developer I can learn with. I'm young and i'm new and stupid and would love to learn this is just don't know where to start there is so much. I do know some basic C# and i want to use unity. I can do some pixel art though it is not up to the standard i would like but that can be improved. I would really enjoy to meet someone who has knowledge of the subject and can teach me on their spare time. Thanks i really appreciate if your read this post.

Hi Erik, though I'm not a candidate I can offer some advice that you may find useful.  You're at a great age to get started, and depending on how much you can devote to learning you can cover some major ground.  Think of a simple game you want to make.  Maybe try out a gamedev challenge.  Use Unity and learn how to ask the most basic questions such as, how do I make an intro screen?  Type your questions into google and see what tutorials you can find and follow.  The initial learning curve is going to be the hardest.  Figuring out how to ask the right sort of questions is going to take time, learning to talk like a programmer.  But it will come.  You don't need a mentor, trust me on that.  You just need a little nudge in the right direction and the willingness to jump in and get your feet wet.  All the best.  

6 hours ago, Awoken said:

You don't need a mentor, trust me on that.

Very True. Posting your questions, problems and how to make next steps, here can achieve better than a personal mentor will do 

In addition to what's been said, there are some cheap classes that take you through the creation of multiple complete games and where you likely will have access to the instructor (I see those constantly for less than $15 specifically teaching unity). From this basis, you can then keep on expanding your knowledge according to you interests.

Hope this helps

My 2 cents: just learn to program small games in C ++( non OOP of course), using whatever low-level library you like for rendering.

Surely learning how to use unity it's useful and fun right now (and also gives you the best results in the least amount of time), but learning how to program games all by yourself is a skill that has an infinite value, mostly at your age. (And the earlier you're confident with programming the better it is)

http://lazyfoo.net/tutorials/SDL/ I started from there, the tutorials are very good and to the point ( tutorials 1 to 15 are enough for starters I guess), in a couple of months I'm sure you'll have all the basic stuff you need to start building more complex games: rendering bitmaps, playing audio, and keyboard input.

And as other people said, asking questions about stuff you don't really understand is the best chance you have to improve at game programming, you don't need a _real_ mentor.

Feel free to drop me a pm if you're interested in the idea and want to discuss more

Udemy.com has courses for creating games in Unity that aren't expensive. You can also buy some books on Amazon that show how to design and implement games.

You're not going to find someone to just up and become your mentor. It's hard work and not much reward in it. That being said, the gamedev.net community is an excellent communal mentor. If you know some C#, get Unity setup and start working through some of the awesome Unity tutorials. When you get to problems you can't figure out, post a question here, and within a few hours or a few days you'll almost always get useful answers back. Right now, your best teacher is going to be your own dedication and determination.

- Eck

I suggest you will start from the small and basic game. And try to do some research on google for some basic game tutorials. 

 I personally switched from udemy and Lynda to YouTube for learning , as i found the content better and more concise. Maybe you should use this approach if you do not want to spend hundreds on courses, especially for unity the number of channels is very high and the content and learning value surpasses in my opinion a lot of commercial alternatives(most of udemy and Lynda material always felt rushed and rarely covered concepts behind doing something and felt a lot like a narration of code that left you with a working game prototype but little idea of why you used one approach or another).

 Some channels i learn from and still follow :

 Brackeys ( love how he explains the concept behind most things he covers and is very to the point, also has full projects , my favorite at the moment);

N3K EN

  quill18creates

BurgZergArcade

 I am sure there are a lot more out there , so happy learning.

On 3/13/2018 at 5:06 PM, Washantor said:

Hello my name is Erik Reis i'm 15 and i just got into game development. I don't want to spend hundreds of bucks on online classes i just want someone to help me. Kinda like a mentor or another new developer I can learn with. I'm young and i'm new and stupid and would love to learn this is just don't know where to start there is so much. I do know some basic C# and i want to use unity. I can do some pixel art though it is not up to the standard i would like but that can be improved. I would really enjoy to meet someone who has knowledge of the subject and can teach me on their spare time. Thanks i really appreciate if your read this post.

Hey @Washantor,
I'm a professional game programmer.   

There has been some great advice in this thread already, especially what was said about working on small games.   
The best way to learn is by doing.   Pick some super simple ideas that you think would be fun and build them in Unity or Unreal.
Do you know what part of game development you're most interested in? (i.e. are you more into programming, design, art, etc?)

I don't have a ton of free time, but feel free to email me at richbenson@gmail.com if you have some questions about programming / game development.    

Good luck and have fun!