Design Patterns for Game Programming

Penny de Byl has a game design course on Udemy, I haven't started it yet (maybe won't ever) but I have done her courses on shaders and math for CV and they were great, I think her irl job is teaching at some university. Plus her name is Penny, and she's Australian which makes it extra fun listening to her say "cube" over and over.

And as an added bonus, it's Udemy where you're always guaranteed to save at least 99.9995% on the list price of $2,000,000.00 (for a limited time, i.e. "forever")

I was in a relatively similar position to you about a year ago: I had no idea how to code and while I could understand a few basic fundamentals, like variables, the rest felt like jargon.

What I'd really recommend is picking up a Udemy tutorial that teaches coding through game design. My personal favorite (and the one that ultimately got me into game design) is Complete C# Unity Developer 2D: Learn to Code Making Games.

This tutorial is excellent for complete beginners. It does spend a lot of time teaching the basics of Unity, so it might not be the right tutorial for you, but it teaches the fundamentals of C# programming as a "spiral syllabus," which is a fancy way of saying it teaches concepts and then continues to reinforce them with greater complexity over the course of the curriculum. So you'll start out learning basics, but then practice them again and again until it becomes second nature—and this course will take you to a point where you'll be pretty comfortable programming simple games in Unity.

From there, it's a matter of expanding your knowledge by targeting key things that you don't understand and simply learning about them, but you'll have a strong foundation that'll make that much easier. A good first step for after you've learned the basics is learning game design patterns, which are basically different programming formulas you can apply in different scenarios to save a lot of time. These will naturally also teach you about more complex parts of a given language and the philosophy behind good code.

I'm still very new to game dev—it's only been a year—but I really like Udemy as opposed to YouTube just because the courses tend to be more holistically designed rather than one-off tutorials, which can be challenging to string together into something cohesive that you learn. But everyone is different!

Just make sure to only buy these courses when they're on sale for a steep discount (which happens often on Udemy). I paid about $20 for each one, which is frankly an absurdly good deal.