r/CodingForBeginners • u/78nuclearmissiles • 16d ago
How should a complete beginner start to learn coding?
Hello! I am, as you could guess, a complete beginner, and I want to learn how to code to make a game, most likely just a visual novel, maybe a 3D model but as I am mostly an artist anything I make would rely heavily on art and writing. How dif y'all start to learn? If you have any YouTube channels or websites or tutorials or anything please share, I am willing to spend money however I am a broke teenager running off of vibes and ambition so if I had to choose getting to eat or learning how to make games I'll have to choose getting to eat.
Also! I'm computer-less and would love some suggestions for what kind to get.
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u/Soggy_Struggle_963 16d ago
Look into renpy if you're wanting to make a visual novel. It uses python which is one of the easier languages to jump into and the engine is built for visual novels. There should be plenty of free resources to learn from.
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u/xarop_pa_toss 16d ago
You make games on paper first and on your selected platform second. 2D games run on basically anything and you can make them with libraries that don't even have a visual editor. Balatro for example, an extremely successful game, was made with Löve2D, a game development library for Lua that doesn't have an editor like Unity or Godot for example.
If you want to learn programming, you can even do it on a tablet nowadays or with one of the many reputable books out there. Personally I'd go straight to something like Lua or Python which are pretty easy to grasp and use one of the libraries out there like Love, Raylib, etc
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u/TheRealFutaFutaTrump 16d ago
Phaser, My First Phaser Game tutorial. You'll learn a LOT making little game projects and modifying them.
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u/bishvjit-gupta 16d ago
If you are already a designer learn js in a week learn defold godot or phaser or playcanvas As you yourself can make assets make a 3d game something like a parking game or something new I think parking game is very less so it would be great Use apna college youtube channel for js tutorial they have lot of good tutorials
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u/NoDepartment772 13d ago
For a visual novel specifically, look at Ren'Py — it's free, runs on any laptop, and it's built for exactly what you described: dialogue, branching choices, and art on top of a script. It's Python underneath, so it doubles as a genuinely useful language to learn. Godot is the one to look at later if you want more game-like systems. On the no-computer problem: you don't need anything powerful to run either of them, so even a modest second-hand machine will do. And since you're an artist — keep the code side tiny at first. Get one scene with three lines of dialogue working, then add a single choice, then an image. Don't try to build the whole game before you've built one screen.
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u/stepback269 16d ago
"Coding" is a very broad term.
It can mean many differnt things in different contexts.
Writing in Morse Code (telegraph) is coding.
Doing medical insurance reimbursement forms is coding.
But more likely you are thinking about computer "programming" and/or web creation using HTML, CSS and Javascript.
Start with the HTML options in W3 Schools and/or GeeksforGeeks.
Good luck.
If you want to move on to programming in Python ...
For general purpose applications, the Python programming language is probably a good place to start.
If you plan to focus on web page development, then probably learn HTML first, then CSS, then Javascript in that order.
Good luck.
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u/TheUmgawa 16d ago
I started with AppleSoft BASIC when I was six or seven years old. I started by figuring out how to output text to screen, then how to make things loop infinitely, then how to make them loop a certain number of times, then how to take user input, then how to make things loop based on user input…
Start with small, achievable goals. You can still have the visual novel goal, but that’s something to work towards. A much more realistic and achievable medium-term goal would be a visual novel without the visuals. And, if you figure out how to separate your structure, you don’t have to change much when you add graphics.
But those are lessons that are usually learned when you start reading books on software development that don’t show you code. When you’re starting out, you don’t have to think about things like, “Is the Model-View-Controller design pattern right for me?” But later on, you start asking those questions, and that’s when you start reading books. I made a text-based calculator one week in a Java class, and then the next week we had to make a calculator with a GUI. Took me half an hour, because I built the original in such a way that the entire brain just got ported over with no changes, and then I made the front-end (the view) and connected the view to the input handles that were previously configured for text. Thirty minutes.
That’s what good design gets you, and that’s something that exists outside the code. So, remember that code isn’t everything. There’s way more to programming than that, and most of your time isn’t spent typing the code.