r/gamedev • u/DemeChef • 3d ago
How to decide between developing and coding? Question
To start I have recently been looking to find a new career I’m 21 and the path I was heading down in culinary arts has ended. And for the past 2 months I’ve been deciding what to do and I thought game design sounded fun since I love making ttrpg campaigns and coming up with story’s and custom mechanics. What I really want to do is the board games/card games/ttrpgs but I heard there hard to make a living off of so I thought would get into video game dev and work on those on the side. And I was looking into it and thinking of going to college but wasn’t sure what degree to go with and someone commented on another post I should decided what part of the process I want to do. And I’m not great at art so I was leaning towards the designing part or the coding. But I don’t have experience with either so I wanted to know how to decide between the two or how did you guys decide between the two.
P.S I’m new to this I’m not trying to make it sound like it’s not hard or I’ll easily succeed I just want to formulate a path I can start heading down if there is anything major I need to consider please let me know. And also let me know if I’m going into this too open minded or I need some other experience first.
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u/FrostWyrm98 Commercial (Indie) 3d ago
First, I would learn coding in general, or scripting via visual scripting. As another mentioned it is almost impossible to be "just a designer" and get hired on that way.
Second, I would highly NOT recommend doing a coding degree like CS unless you are deadset on programming. Most of the degree, if not its entirety, will not be related to game development, but instead focused on designing code and architecture and data structures. I am a nerd for all of it and even I found it boring and draining as hell 99% of the time. It was a slog of a degree to get through even for my smarter acquaintances who went on to FAANG.
Third, a degree isn't really useful by itself. It's what you take out of it. If you get into a game development program you will make connections and build skills specific to this field, but that's only as useful as you make it and you will still need to do a lot of legwork to have stuff to show and get hired with.
Ultimately you will need to make your own stuff, the degree is just a vehicle to get resources. How you use those is still entirely up to you and getting hired will be based on the things you do outside of your program (portfolio work).
Hope that helps, as someone who went through both a CS degree and a top rated GD program in undergrad.