In late 2022, I started to look into actual game dev and chose the Unity engine. I was sitting doing yet another Unity tutorial, and I was suddenly struck with a depressing thought: I’ve done this before. Twice, actually. I don’t mean I’d done that same tutorial before, but I’d copied that exact mechanic in two previous tutorials learning C#.
There’s nothing wrong with repetition, but I came to the realization that I was just copying others’ code, line by line.
I’d started learning Unity a few months before, enthusiastically watching GDD talks, reading design books, doing coding exercises and working my way through beginner Unity tutorial after tutorial. I’d watch videos that came up in my feed and marvel how they made these games in 72 hours, but I never thought that I’d be able to make a complete game all by myself.
My partner was practicing pixel art while I slogged away with my books and tutorials, making Pong, Space Shooter, and other super basic games. Sure, I was finishing games, more or less, but I felt I was just copying along with tutorials, something anyone could do. I’d produced some games but I hadn’t really made a game, and for sure wouldn’t be able to reproduce any part of these.
Is 100’s of Tutorial Bookmarks Too Many?
This built up until one day, I was bookmarking yet another beginner Unity tutorial and I realized a literally had over 100 tutorials bookmarked on my browser that I was planning to get to someday. In fact, I still have loads of bookmarks from this time. This crazy amount of bookmarks was concrete proof that I was hiding in the false productivity of collecting resources instead of actually getting creative and making things for myself.
I needed to make the jump from not being able to make games by myself without a tutorial holding my hand step-by-step, or at least I could only make something that would suck. Part of this is realizing that everyone sucks at first – when you read about famous devs’ first games, they were all pretty terrible. But the important part was they made an original game, no matter how bad it was. If you think about it, you could spend dozens (or hundreds) of hours on tutorials, or put the same amount of hours to maybe make one janky game. When did “I’m not confident enough” move from just being a feeling to become an excuse?
Ultimately, keeping myself in tutorial hell was a form of self sabotage disguised as productive skill-building. It wasn’t so much that I was afraid of what would happen if I made something original, more that the process of following tutorials didn’t allow me to do so. Or perhaps I was following the wrong tutorials. With hindsight, I think the best approach is to think about what you want to make, divide it into small sections, and if you don’t know how to make one part, look that up.
Regardless, it was time to seriously look at how many hours I was spending “learning” versus actually creating. At this stage, this was basically all “learning”, and this had already shifted from progress to procrastination. Especially given that this was basically just copying code from videos, line by line. Worse still, not all of these tutorials had high-quality code in the first place and I was in no place to make that distinction.
The Value in Tutorial Hell
It’s important to stress that these tutorials weren’t useless – far from it. I learnt about the engine interface and Unity’s basic functions, just for starters. Tutorial hell wasn’t a complete waste, it was a trade-off. And it’s essential to recognize when spending too long there becomes counterproductive. Learning assignments should be just that – they should teach you what you need to know to move on and create.
This transition is a crucial step in becoming a game dev, but when to take the plunge?I knew I needed a different approach, to use tutorials as tools for creativity, rather than as a goal in themselves.
It was time to create, and not just learn. I thought tutorial hell was hard, but I had no idea how challenging the next step would be. But that’s for next week.
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