/u/Mifuyne said it better than I can. “Big Ideas” almost never work for a first-time game. It’s usually safe to assume, most big published games have taken teams of people multiple years to build. I have some experience, but big ideas are still always my downfall.

Your first game should be a learning experience, and you should aim to finish as fast as possible, while still doing good work. If you are set on a platformer, try an auto-runner like the other comment suggests, or look at arcade games. One level from Donkey Kong or Mario Bros (not Super Mario Bros) is about the limit of complexity I’d suggest for a new dev. Even NES games like Super Mario Bros are pretty complicated, and would take a new developer many months. And there’s no shame in copying a classic game’s mechanics for your first game.

Overwhelmed in what way? Too much to learn, not enough coding knowledge, or something else?

And what types of games are you trying to make? Certain genres are harder or easier for beginners.

Depends how much coding you are comfortable with.

I made my first games in GameMaker: Studio, and it was very good for it, back then. Not sure if it’s as good anymore with the 2.0 version, but it may be worth a shot. With it you can do as much or as little code as you want.

Godot and Unity never clicked with me, but both are good options. They have a steeper learning curve, though.

If you have some comfort with coding, TIC-80 and PICO-8 are great options, with a simple Lua API, big community, and built-in editing tools. Lets you have a lot of control over your game without needing to learn the strange things about major editors.

I used VSCode for a few months and tried the CLion free trial after missing some of the features from IntelliJ I use at work. I think CLion edges out just a little, but not by much. Both have some rough patches.

Next time I pick up a Rust project I want to try neovim; I keep ending in tutorial hell for vim and never actually building anything with it. But before that, I think I want to ditch my Windows OS all together and pick some Linux distro, something I’ve been putting off a very long time.

Old fashioned ads are much less lucrative than highly personalized ads. It’s why so many sites require you to create an account to access their content. The end goal of the platform is to extract heaps of advertising data from you.

That’s my guess. I started on old Reddit 10+ years ago, but now use only the first party apps. They’re clunky and sluggish, but good enough if you just want your doom scrolling fix.

I’m glad this drama alerted me to Lemmy, though. I probably would have joined one sooner had I known about them.