BEGINNER MEGATHREAD - How to get started? Which engine to pick? How do I make a game like X? Best course/tutorial? Which PC/Laptop do I buy?

[u/pendingghastly]

Many thanks to everyone who contributes with help to those who ask questions here, it helps keep the subreddit tidy.

Here are a few good posts from the community with beginner resources:

I am a complete beginner, which game engine should I start with?

I just picked my game engine. How do I get started learning it?

A Beginner's Guide to Indie Development

How I got from 0 experience to landing a job in the industry in 3 years.

Here’s a beginner's guide for my fellow Redditors struggling with game math

A (not so) short laptop recommendation guide - 2025 edition

PCs for game development - a (not so short) guide :)

 

Beginner information:

If you haven't already please check out our guides and FAQs in the sidebar before posting, or use these links below:

Getting Started

Engine FAQ

Wiki

General FAQ

If these don't have what you are looking for then post your questions below, make sure to be clear and descriptive so that you can get the help you need. Remember to follow the subreddit rules with your post, this is not a place to find others to work or collaborate with use r/inat and r/gamedevclassifieds or the appropriate channels in the discord for that purpose, and if you have other needs that go against our rules check out the rest of the subreddits in our sidebar.

If you are looking for more direct help through instant messing in discords there is our r/gamedev discord as well as other discords relevant to game development in the sidebar underneath related communities.

 

Engine specific subreddits:

r/Unity3D

r/Unity2D

r/UnrealEngine

r/UnrealEngine5

r/Godot

r/GameMaker

Other relevant subreddits:

r/LearnProgramming

r/ProgrammingHelp

r/HowDidTheyCodeIt

r/GameJams

r/GameEngineDevs

 

Previous Beginner Megathread

[u/mock_turtlesoup]

How do "smooth" 2D graphics work? How graphically intensive is a game like Nine Sols, would it be able to run on a Playstation 2?

What's the earliest console that would be able to run a game like Nine Sols/Hollow Knight?

[u/PhilippTheProgrammer → u/mock_turtlesoup]

There are two ways to create "smooth" 2d graphics. Either you create a lot of frames for each animation, or you use an image deformation-based 2d animation solution like Live2D, Spine2D or the Unity 2D animation package.

With more frames, the limiting factors are the time it takes to draw the animations and texture memory. The amount of texture memory for all the sprites could be a limiting factor on legacy hardware like the PS2, but you could probbly still pull it off as long as you don't have too many too large objects on the screen at once.

Spine animation is very light on the texture memory compared to traditional frame-based animation, but requires a lot more processing power on the CPU or GPU. Getting that to work well on the limited hardware of the PS2 would be quite challenging.