If you don't make progress, check if these limit you! | Gamedev Dairy #72
Hacks for learning, productivity, having work-life-passion balance and finally game development!
TL;DR
Short recap
Will the choice be comfortable enough?
Should you choose a minimal tech stack or a comfortable one?
Ambition, but not in a good way
Recommendations
Short recap
As I mentioned before - I decided to switch my Godot learning from GDScript to C#.
I also decided to fast-read the documentation from the beginning to re-learn and check the updates, only to learn that for 4.0 the documentation was marked as not up to date 😊 Wasn't much of a problem anyway as I did mostly for the C# snippets 😊
Will the choice be comfortable enough?
When I was starting, I defined comfort by looking at GDScript’s advantages, like access to Godot's features first, or leaving little code to be written.
What I did not think about is trying to use two programming languages almost at the same time. If GDScript was a C-family language it might've been easier. But making a switch from C# to GDScript each day was overwhelming.
I'll bet there are developers who are not affected by this mindset. Unfortunately, I am. Thus my decision.
Should you choose a minimal tech stack or a comfortable one?
When choosing GDScript I was thinking about keeping things simple. As I already mentioned I had to think again.
It wasn't as simple as I thought it would be. Godot Editor does support C#, but its Intellisense support was rather poor, so in order to write code I'm running Visual Studio Code (a normal Visual Studio would be overkill) next to Godot Editor.
It's not the most comfortable solution, but fairly close, as it only requires dealing with one popup that informs that a file was edited outside of the Godot Editor. It's mildly annoying, and I can live with that.
Thankfully, VS Code has some extensions that are useful for Godot game makers like Godot-Tools or Mono Debug, that are very handy!
Ambition, but not in a good way
When I look at it from a distance I tried to be ambitious and approach it in a proper way. And the problem hides in the word “proper”.
I need to put ambition away for a while because it doesn't help.
One can be ambitious when he wants to improve his skills, not when learning them. Here, the MVP approach will be much better. Learn as fast as you can (basic skills as an MVP), then iterate on them (improve your skills) step by step.
If there’s one person that can explain this to everyone it’s Y Combinator’s Michael Seibel. Here’s a very interesting clip in which he shared some thoughts on creating an MVP. I think even as aspiring game developers we can take something from it.
Recommendations
I skipped sharing the part about creating music, but the gameplay is something you and I have to hear!
And as dessert, allow me to share a documentary about World Championships in Excel, the next best absurd sport discipline next to chess boxing 😉 I guess that’s what higher alliance management does in Eve Online 😉
You hear all the time that consistency does magic. Hear it one more time! 😊