Hello everyone.
I'm Geuz from The Netherlands.
Was educated in art school, studied some theology, have been active in the local art assembly of my town for a while. I've been doing music/sound art, also on radio, before the internet took off, would draw cartoons, have always been doing lots of story writing. In the 1990's, I tried to learn programming but couldn't find a free compiler or game engine. Game engines in the 1990's where extremely expensive, it could cost a million bucks to use one. Visual Basic was also very expensive.
Since I didn't know how to program, I wasn't able to express any of my own idea's in the video game format.
This year in February, I would visit the 4chan forum a lot, and noticed that I was attracted to the technology discussions, where only computer programming was discussed. From lurking around, I assumed that in order to learn programming, one you should start with Python, and noticed that the Python compiler was free to use. I already knew Python from Blender, a program I already used often, so decided to do Python tutorials.
I already knew HTML for years earlier, would do the website for a local art assembly in the past, and am very fluent in HTML, which I learned in less than a week, but would really learn after debugging the websites I would build with the AI program Megahall. This program was an AI chat engine, and I would paste in HTML source codes in it, to let it reply in webpages full of bugs. After a month of debugging his/her HTML pages, and making these AI generated paintings into a website, my knowledge and understanding of HTML was so well founded, that I was also able to also do CSS for websites, without ever having to have done any tutorial on CSS.
I also made dozens of levels for Dungeon Keeper, had them posted on a website I made, and had to learn Dungeon Keeper Scripting language to make these maps. The hacking community around Dungeon Keeper was awesome, and 3 level editors made by fans where Available, which I all used to make maps. However, I would learn that scripting language in about one or two days, and became fluent in it, once I made dozens of maps, and helped to debug maps from the community.
But it didn't work that way with Python.
I didn't know how to practice, I had nothing to program or debug.
I checked pygame, because drawing, music and stories are no problem to me, but thought pygame to be a very bad game engine, because Python is to slow for executing games. After that, I did some Unity tutorials, but wasn't able to make any game myself without learning C# first. Did a C# tutorial, but it is a very hard syntax to learn, for some one who doesn't understand anything about programming.
At first, Godot looked like a bad engine to me, because the graphics on the index page look terrible; this 3D with all the polygon corners in circles, terrible lightning, than the white pages for a website. I find the Godot index page ugly, and it turned me off at first. Cry engine's presentation looks best, I thought it to be the best engine.
But I changed my mind, once I downloaded Godot itself, and noticed the small file, without the install hell, and the fast start-up of the program. I made me think of the early days of Blender, which was back than also a small file, without install hell. Once I saw the interface, in dark, which you can only get in Unity if you pay every month, than I started to love this engine. I have always preferred open source programs, I use Gimp as my main editing program for 20 years already, although am not savvy enough to install Linux.
So I decided to learn programming using the Godot engine.
It's going slowly, very slowly.
I've had no education for coding, we didn't even have computers at art school.
I was good at math in high school though, that surely helps a lot.
I also have a game I want to make in my mind, but want to learn coding first.
And enter some game jams, before I seriously start the complex game that I have in mind.
I really love the Godot engine, am very impressed by the Godot 4.0 presentations.
I decided to apply for this forum, because am interested in discussions about some subjects here.
