My Sister Learns Game Dev In 25 Days

My sister wants to learn game development, so I designed 25 challenges for her to teach her game development in just 25 days. Hello there. Purpose of this is for me to find out if I like game dev. Clara has some programming experience, but none in C#. She followed one or two Unity tutorials in the past, but it didn't get her very far. So, we're pretty much starting from scratch here. I let her choose between one of the three engines that I would be able to help her with, and she went with Unity. We started out extremely basic, and just to illustrate how basic, this is me explaining to her how to create a square. There you go. There you have a square. For the first day, I challenged her to make a simple ball rolling game, one time in 2D and one time in 3D. I'm teaching with a fairly hands-off approach, so I'll just leave Clara to it now, and we'll see how she does.

As often as I could, I wanted to check in with my sister, see what she made, and provide some feedback. Exciting first Clara game. Yeah. Oh my god, it even has a face. Yeah. Oh, wait, I forgot the to jump with space. Okay, and now? Uh yeah. WOAH. FROM HERE ON OUT, the challenges will get more and more difficult every day. So, for the second day, I challenged my sister to make two games once again. I think the fact that you have to make two encourages you not to get stuck on the details too much. What Clara should learn first is how to find her way around the game engine, and how to code in C#. Making more than one game in a day means she gets more experience with that a lot faster. I particularly wanted her to get more familiar with the physics system of Unity, because that's really at the core of a lot of things you do in the engine. So, I challenged her to make this simple ball dropping game, where you try to collapse a tower by dropping balls on it, and she did an excellent job with this one. Clara and I are both huge fans of Outer Wilds, so for the second game, I challenged her to

remake the spaceship movement. This is very easy to set up in Unity. The only problem is that beginners tend to overcomplicate their solutions quite a lot. So, especially including the gravitational force of different planets and so on, this turned out to be too difficult, which is my fault, but it was also kind of a good thing at the same time, cuz the next day we came back together and fixed up the most pressing issues. And I think it turned into a pretty valuable lesson about debugging. Whatever's in the for each, apparently apparently is never called, cuz otherwise we would have seen some Okay, find game objects with tag planets. I don't know, let's see if you have some Hopefully, I assigned them the right tag. Oh, they're untagged. Look at that. I gave my sister a little introduction to the UI system and how to make things scale correctly, cuz that can be very frustrating to figure out on your own. The challenge for the day, make an entirely UI-based game, and what better game to do that than a clicker game. Clara did a fantastic job with this, even with some custom art here, a get rich button, as well as some custom art for the upgrades. be quite overwhelming to start with

something completely new. I've realized that when I started to follow some tutorials, and yeah, now I have Flappy Bird, but I don't know how to do anything else. It's all too easy to get stuck in tutorial hell. The only and best way to learn as a beginner is to make some games on your own. That way you become a better and better problem solver, and you need to be a good problem solver. That's why the only way is to grind it out and to get your hours in. [Music] The dishwasher needs my attention. I still have the Plants vs. Zombies game. Oh my god, I worked on it yesterday until like 1:00 a.m. [Music] [Music]

[Music] It's time to mix things up, because today is the day for the big coding exam. like I'm back in school again. to see where Clara stands, because I want to move on to more important things. The only thing Clara knows so far is that she's not going to be allowed to use ChatGPT or any other AI chatbot. get started. ChatGPT is a incredibly empowering resource. I agree, you'd be a fool not to use it. It's like having a personal teacher. However, it can easily develop into an over-reliance, and that's not healthy. Let's be honest, I do rely on ChatGPT a lot, and I hope I learned something using ChatGPT. The challenge was for her to make any

high score game she wants. So, this is also the first time she has a lot of freedom on her hand. She can really create whatever she wants almost. The test is on. I should have known, but of course her number one priority was to make a game that she could beat me in. Why I said it's going to be hard to find a game where I'm like better than him is because I'm not sure in which areas I can even surpass Jonas. Like I'm Let's make a list. [Music] Hello. Mhm, mhm, I see green and red squares. Yeah. The goal is to remember all of the green ones. Yeah, exactly. Oh god. I'm at minus 110 points now. Yeah,

exactly. So, if you just keep guessing, of course you got to get a lot of minus points. The fact that Clara can make something like this entirely on her own after just 9 days of working with Unity gives me a lot of confidence that we are indeed ready to move on, because what Clara already knows is that in the final 5 days of this challenge, she will make her own video game, including sounds, graphics, code, everything. I want her to leave this challenge with something awesome to show for it, and we only have a couple more days left to build her up to that. Like I have another challenge going right now, side challenge. Kind of. Like I'm making an acrylic painting every single day. loves making art, so now we're entering her domain. I want her to get a lot more comfortable with getting her art into Unity. She ended up skinning her Plants vs. Zombies clone and turned it into Candies vs. Robots. Here you can see her with a big grin on her face. For the next day, I just gave her a couple of tutorial links and challenged her to animate a character.

[Music] Yay, look who's in the house. Hey, it's me. I thought it would be cool to show you around in how how a bigger Unity project looks like. One thing we do that I know a lot of people are not a big fan of, but that kind of works well enough is we have a lot of manager objects. Basically, for everything in the game, there's a A manager. A manager. Instead of drawing paths on the ground, I just draw 3D paths here. You can see this is Okay, you have some questions for me. Yeah, I brought some questions for you, because I want to know your secret. So, how do you manage to work so focused that you don't need to work super long, because you said you only work like 6 hours or something like that per day. The secret is I want to go home.

Then I showed my sister how to create 2D animations in Blender, because I thought that would very much fit her style. Blender is of course a massively complex and difficult to learn program, so she struggled with this challenge quite a bit. But she managed to get the animation over to Unity, and therefore completed the challenge. For the next day, while we're at it, I challenged Clara to 3D model anything she wants, once again in Blender. It was difficult, it was painful, but she managed to do it. But I just realized that um it's actually a tutorial series with like Yeah. with 14 parts. Bad news, you can't learn Blender in a day. The next day, I showed her how to do it with better topology, how to unwrap the book, and how to texture it. And her only goal for the day was essentially to replicate what I've already shown her. If you've never used Blender before, that's more than difficult enough. This is what she made. Mission successful. I kind of want Clara to dabble with everything a little bit, so I made her learn the basics of shader graph. thing is not really what I came up with. It's a little bit too complicated for

me, but I really like the look on the book. Also, I made a glow in here. This the end of my time here in the same house as my brother. Let's see what he says. Oh, he's not there anymore. [Music] Today is the last day where I actually learn something new, and as always, Jonas likes to give me all tutorials to make. There's a really interesting challenge for today, like tower that collapses with wooden and stony blocks, and they make like click-clack sounds. [Music]

I think Clara's now sufficiently equipped to make a small but complete video game. She will now have 3 days to come up with three prototypes and then another 5 days to turn one of them into a complete game. [Music] Hello. I slept pretty bad tonight. So, I started just later today. It's already midday after midday, but I'll work on it probably 6 hours, give my best because I have my energy back now and yeah, let's see. Let's see what I make. A long day of game dev is over. I'm pretty happy with the result. I was very addicted and didn't program that much anymore. The ice cream cone game is not off my mind yet. You're holding the ice cone and there fall like balls that you have

to catch. Like you also have to balance it, you know? In Jonas knows I'm not the best at making quick decisions. Nice. This is the one prototype Clara didn't even dare to show me because she did not manage to make it feel the way she wanted to. Yesterday I kept thinking really hard about what to do today because yesterday I just wasn't very happy with the idea I chose. So, I spent that extra time on brainstorming in some games. I really like this discovery moment or this kind of randomness like when you uncover a new um area. It was time to make a choice and to talk strategy. This is the treasure card here on the right side and I am this diamond shape shaped player icon here. I uncover the map and I have to look. I can also rotate my treasure map. So, the red dot marks where the treasure is So, you don't also don't know how it's rotated. Yeah, I see what you mean. It would would make for a It would probably make for a full-on rogue like if you wanted to wear after

each level you choose a new item or something. Yeah, or an yeah, an upgrade like now your side radius is two instead of one or something. So, what's a little bit risky about this prototype is that it's, you know, it's not quite fun yet. Yeah, there's grandpa here and I have to wait for the gangster cars to pass. These cars are coming pretty quickly at me and I'm very very slow. So, there are these um spaces where I'm safe, obviously, but you also have an escape mechanic. You can take a small leap, but if you do that, then you're basically stunned for half a second. Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't know what I would add a lot more here in this game. Nothing. That's That's the entire point. You You don't have time to add anything, Clara. You don't believe me. You don't have that much time. This is not a major deciding factor, but I think also this would probably look better in the video. Also, this idea I think allows you to um

focus more more on the more on the polishing and less on the gameplay. [Music] Yeah, I mean, probably that is I think the more I think the more I think about it, the more I'm like um I would probably recommend you go with this one, but I'll obviously still leave it up to you which one you want to go with. The pressure was on and as my sister tends to do, she had very high expectations for herself. Going into it, she thought that 5 days would be plenty plenty of time to do almost anything she wants, but reality quickly caught up with her as she got stuck on a major bug that caused her to completely halt progress. Three and a half hours now and I failed. No worries. That's why That's why I gave you the advice to go with the easier, safer option for a game cuz these things are very normal to happen. So, yeah, basically the problem that I have is that I wanted to restart my scene after every run. So, So, the only prob The only problem is that these three

references are lost. That's the only problem. Yeah, I know. I always have the problems with references. You mean here? So, what Yeah, what do you want the game manager to do? Needless to say, I tried my best to pull her out of the swamp and rekindle her spirit a little bit cuz she was down. So, maybe you heard that evening in my voice it was desperate, I know. Still a little bit disappointed that I spent so much time on this high score thing. I realized already that I have a lot of things on my to-do list also for the next days. [Music] So, here we are again on the next day and I thought before I make my own grandpa character just yet again, I'll will test out if the old grandpa from my other project if I can transfer this to the new one so that this work is not in vain. And if I run out of time, if it takes a lot of time to make this work, then at least I have a decent model to work with. Starting with

technical things already today, but um I took a little bit of break this um this morning, so I guess I'll feel fit enough to continue now. I only have 3 days left and I really have to get going now because um the art style has to get done today, basically. my sister the advice to go with an unlit cartoony flat-shaded style. First, because she was really starting to run out of time and secondly, because she wanted it to blend with a 2D character in the foreground. Starting the gameplay took a bit longer than expected, but it was finally time for Clara to get to the visuals of the game. Watching all of the footage that my sister sent me now, I have to say I'm very proud to see her apply all of the things that I've taught her just a couple of days ago. She was very tired and the project took a big toll on her, but her creative passion was back online. I'm glad I'm done with the cars now. Now was um the pavement and stuff like that. Watching my sister at work now, you could tell me that she's been doing game design for 20 years and I I would probably believe it. Obviously, she's a

good artist, but to think that she's only been using Unity for like 20 days now, come on, it's unbelievable. I've always avoided this because my brother already is a great game designer, so I felt like this path I I cannot take it anymore because um I have so someone close to me that's just so good at it. But that someone can also help guide you and provide you with feedback and advice that otherwise you wouldn't have access to. I do understand everyone who wants to find their own path in life, but following a path that somebody you know took before you is not a disadvantage. That's an advantage that allows you to catch up much faster if you want to. Probably go to something bluish and more purple. I feel like worked pretty well with them. Yeah, because I made the grandpa quite light because I thought I would have a darker background, so I would Yeah, I would make a darker background. Oftentimes you feel like yeah, I have to stand out kind of. I have to be different than my siblings as well. So,

probably not an easy path if I wanted to take it. a couple more good tips for my sister and I think she was starting to surprise herself with what she was capable of. Better colors for the cars would also be a huge huge upgrade. [Music] My favorite thing actually was just every day learning something completely new and at the end of seeing some results um that I couldn't have fathomed would be possible for me to Yeah. I think it's always very rewarding in the beginning when you're learning something because you always just like so huge steps every single day and yeah, it was very very fun. Nice. With some voice acting from your husband. Yeah. I was acting myself at first, but I did

I just don't sound like a grandpa. Oh, and the gangster cars even make a sound or Yeah, they make a a a different car sound um additionally. Like the other cars don't make car sounds. That's just car ambience. So, do you use the dash sometimes? Sometimes, but very sparingly. Yeah, same for me, but sometimes it's useful, right? Sometimes it saves your life and then it looks very appropriate with with the animation and everything. This has been one of the most moving videos I think I've ever made for me personally and I'm struggling to put into words why. It's probably just awesome to share my passion with someone I really care about. Do you think you will keep making games or do you think you'll move on to other experiments? Um I'm actually not sure yet, but um I'm still very unsure about my future. I think a lot of people in this situation are so afraid of climbing the wrong mountain that they end up not climbing any mountain at all. You know what? I

think meaning can't be found on top of a mountain, especially not nowadays where we're building machines that can climb mountains way way way way faster than any of us will ever be able to. I believe that meaning is derived more from how you go and not so much from where you go. You're hiking and hiking and hiking. Meow. People are overtaking you. Meow. Couple of robots just surpassed you as well, but you just keep walking at a steady pace with your head up and a big grin on your face because there's so much enjoyable lovely road still ahead of you. I can show you the paths I've been on, but you can also find your own. Enjoy your hike, Clara. [Music]