hobofreddy55

I think I realized that it was what I wanted to do when I was doing software engineering work over the Summer and I couldn't stop thinking about how much fun it would be to develop games full time. I spent a lot of the days at work with Visual Studio open on one monitor and GDC (Game Developers Conference) talks open on the other.

As far as recently goes, there are definitely days that I didn't want to start working, mostly when I had a lot of 3D modeling to do. Just by pushing myself to start each day hours could go by and I would hardly notice because I was actually enjoying myself!

Yes, should hopefully be available on the App Store in a week! Since I used Unity it will be incredibly easy to port it to iOS, the only reason I haven't was because I was holding off on paying the $100 developer fee.

I highly recommend using an engine like Unity or Unreal to get started. Unreal has a pretty good visual-scripting system (think drag and drop boxes) that can be good for beginners but I don't have experience with it. My suggestion would be for them to look into learning how to program and to look at doing computer science in college. There are colleges that offer game design or game development degrees but I feel that computer science gives you a very good fallback if neither of those work out (or if they just decide they don't want to work in games later). Unity can be a bit of a leap if you're just starting out but they'll learn a lot by trying it. I highly recommend the YouTubers Brackeys (/u/brackeys) and Sebastion Lague as their videos have helped me a lot in the past and are always enjoyable to watch! If they're very interesting into game design as well they should check out the GDC youtube channel and watch some of the talks on there.

Unlike many people who do computer science in college I actually had pretty minimal programming experience before school. I started out doing an online Java course through my local library my senior year of high school but it wasn't very good and I didn't retain much. Messed around with Codecademy for bit too before taking my first programming class Spring semester my freshman year. First language was C...do not recommend to start! (something like Java, Javascript, or Python are better)

I would never just jump straight into doing development full time without a good plan and some experience. If you are looking at seriously doing it then I would begin by learning a game-making method, usually an engine like Unity, Unreal, or GameMaker. I had about 3 years of experience with Unity before starting this project. Not all of that was full-time working with Unity but I would do side projects here and there for fun. PM me if you want any more advice or have any specific questions!