in my vision this year i wanted to uplevel and learn game development. the application would be as a hobbiest for now. ambitiously i want to tell geat stories via AR/VR apps questions: 1) any suggestions on groups i can meet up with that are into this kinda stuff like hack-a-thons? 2) i have access to udemy: any pointers on where to start learning (context: in another life i learned perl/SQL bit thats the extent of my “coding”). 3) im almost 40, is it too late to get into game dev as a career path if this hobby takes off? be brutally honest. TC: $280k, read here- im not an engineer before someone trolls my pay. 😁 thanks all!!
Game development is multifaceted - since you have no real engineering experience, and probably no art experience what exactly is it that you want to learn? You can probably cobble together prototypes and concepts in public frameworks/engines like Unity and Unreal. As for game dev as a career path at that age- not uncommon but you’d need to be able to find a position parallel to what you do now in order to get some sort of pay parity
Thanks for the feedback! I want to really learn design and I guess scripting? The genesis of all of this is that I have a newborn so I want to learn how to make video games then teach him as well. I figure I have 6-7 years to get my skills up. I want to make games that’s run on raspberry pi and mobile if anything.
Does it have to be AR or VR? There are lots of simpler options that you can use to make 2D games that can hit those same notes like GameMaker and Godot that can help you ramp up on scripting and design work. There is also Unity with the TinyUnity package that aims to deploy a very lightweight package running on HTML5.