I don't think these game dev tutorials are a waste of time or anything but i hate pre-prepared asset packs. I know this is probably what people want because the game looking pretty automatically makes it feel '''real''' but there was one tutorial I followed where the teacher just drew every asset as he was making it. I had way more fun doing it that way and I am absolutely terrible at drawing. When you're just copying code and learning which menus are hiding which resources you need, I think getting to do one thing your way, even if that way is terrible, feels empowering?
I am having fun doing code tutorials for children though. Daniel Shiffman's coding train has been my favorite so far, and what makes it good to me imo is 1. It focuses on concepts, patterns, and math but leaves you with enough tools to do play around on your own with them. 2. He usually throws out an exercise at the very end of a video that's something you're completely capable of doing, generally simple and solvable in an hour or so. You have a specific goal of what you want to achieve, but it's general enough that you can pick a result you're excited about, even if it's something like "I want to make a field of flowers"
Most tutorials, partially because they have all these juicy 2D asset packs provided, make big assumptions about what you want to do and why, and assumptions about what 'feels good'. I'm not going to say I understand better than established convention, but I would prefer convention to be phrased as such, not as "it looks bad, and here's the tween that makes it look good". Unity's own beginner programmer course has everything running off of rigidbody physics, as if this was the default way movement in games should be done. That is a pretty big assumption and rigidbody physics for 2D games generally feels awful. They are certainly proud of their physics engine and it lets you easily make physics sanbox games, but what if you don't want to do that?
Since every game design student wants to make mario or zelda generally game tutorials are oriented towards making one of those games, but I wish they were a bit more abstract. Obviously I'm asking for something more like "a real education" than a game engine or specific feature, I'm just finding that it is hard to find something like this for games specifically. Of course, the other side of this is having coding patterns presented so abstractly and context-free that it's difficult to understand how to use or apply them, but I'm starting to get a bit better and understanding what to do with them.
I'm open to recommendations though! I'm grinding through basic tutorials for using Godot at this point, but I might appreciate something that can teach me more fundamentals.
