So, a question that I'm guessing you all have dealt with before. I'm not a professional dev but I've made little hobby games and jam games with my friends, and lately I've been deluged with people IRL and on Discord who have a Cool Game Idea but don't know where to start or have no coding experience, and want to know what engine to use, what tutorials to watch, etc. How do I explain gently how hard it is to make what they want to make and that they need way more than just a Cool Idea?

I'm not asking to be a jerk or kill their dreams, I just genuinely want to find the right words to explain why you can't just poof out a game from nothingness

That's tough. If asked specifically about how I got started, I give the book jacket synopsis of my story: I started with a couple of books back in the day & then studied CS at uni.

As for cluing them into to the relative difficulty, unless they ask, I don't. My experience is that's something that most people need to experience for themselves. Plus, I might be wrong - occasionally people do have what it takes & I don't want to dissuade them. Otherwise, I tend to stick to generics like "that sounds really ambitious" or maybe "what's your plan for technical problem XYZ".

In general though, I feel like it's a hard thing to communicate to the uninitiated; we don't know how much we don't know.

That's a fair point, yeah. One of the people who's been asking me dev questions has actually a fairly doable concept, but some of the other people have absolutely insane concepts that I know they will never make on par with like "cloning World of Warcraft but better" or "living world MMO" and I have to bite my tongue real hard. I'm trying my best to be encouraging though, because you're right, you never know and it might be something where they would learn a lot from trying.

I try not to be one of those gatekeepers who's like "you can't join my hobby unless you have X" because that's just being mean and nobody wins.

I usually give the advice "your first game will not be your dream game", and frame it as something to work up to incrementally.

So you want to make [Cool Idea]? Awesome. Start with PONG, or Breakout, Tetris, Snake, Asteroids, Space Invaders - something simple you can find introductory tutorials about.

Just putting "beginner game tutorial" into a search engine will pull up a tonne of examples like this. Skim a few, see if the style of presentation in one feels more appealing or makes more sense to you. Great, now you've selected your first tutorial and engine - work through the tutorial all the way.

New devs often worry about choosing the "wrong" engine, but there really isn't such a thing. Any engine or tech stack you learn teaches fundamentals and practices ways of thinking that apply to others, so picking up your second piece of gamedev tech will go faster for the time you've invested in your first. And you'll level up your own understanding of what makes a "good" engine for your needs/style along the way.

Another way I've heard this put is "Your first 10 games will suck, so get them over with quickly" - don't fuss over whether the choices you're making are perfect, or whether the tutorials you're finding are for the exact kind of game you ultimately want to make. Just grab what's easy at hand and lets you make progress right away. The process is more important than the product.

When folks ask me to recommend tutorials, I remind them that when I was learning the craft, dinosaurs still roamed the Earth. Tech has changed a lot since then, and many better resources are available, but I won't have first-hand experience with the learning journey in them.

In general: experienced game developers won't be experts on what tutorials are useful today, so for that, it's better to talk to fellow learners. Find a game development enthusiast club / Discord / student group / etc. and aks folks who are at a similar stage or a little ahead of you, what worked well for them.

That is all fantastic advice, thank you Gregory. The "start with a tiny game, learn from that one and build better ones" approach is one I had already recommended to them because it's how I started too. I might actually just send them this entire block of text :p

Another thing I emphasized to them was that a lot of tutorials walk you through how to build something, but not why they made specific coding or design choices or how to think like a developer. So I told them to seek out resources on how to make decisions and how to make coding structure choices, rather than just game-making tutorials.

Good point. Once they've got some baseline code literacy, Game Programming Patterns is a great way to learn more of the "why" of common structures/strategies and when they're appropriate.

Mark Brown has a good video on the challenges of learning to make games via tutorials, which may have some useful advice for folks getting snagged where you describe.

What he talks about with breaking a game down into the simplest steps, then trying to solve each step one at a time, is a major skill that I see a lot of beginners skipping over.

@Sciborg yeah, I'm entirely self-taught, and that advice is really solid. Regarding "crushing their dreams" it's important to crush that idea that their first attempt can be an MMO or God of War or whatever. As said it's best to do it in a way that redirects them to smaller projects. but it's absolutely necessary to get that point across.

We had one such beginner in here who wanted to make a 3d soccer game where each analog stick was a foot.