// Happy New Year

31st Dec 2024

// The advice of a game developer has convinced me to stop trying to learn to make a game by following along to tutorials, as that method often returns zero experience. The sad news is you don't find that out until your tutorial is over and you then enthusiastically fire up a new blank project to put everything you've learned into practice only to hit a brick wall immediately and realize you're still level 1- it's just not an effective way to learn.

I've pivoted towards learning the fundamentals of the C# language itself, completely removed from game development, which means I've been making simple console applications. This approach is already paying off: instead of blindly copying the actions of a skilled developer I now have a much better understanding of Object-Oriented Programming itself, learning about how things such as classes, methods, accessors, objects etc work. What's the difference between a field and a property you ask? I'll let you know when it's clearer to me! Learning C# is proving to be a challenge, but so far it's been more about patience and perseverance than anything else.

Once I've got a better understanding of the languages fundamentals I plan to find a few (very) simple games and try to build them myself, using my own solutions rather than someone else's. Sure I will need to hold Google's hand as I go, but I won't be spoon-fed the answers all in one place, and will try to figure as much out on my own as I can. Here's to 2025!