i used to be a good generic programmer, and i wanted to step up in game development, people only like what they see. But my mind cannot wrap itself around trigonometry or any geometry more advanced than 7th grade geometry. I think its back to console applications and wpf for me.
@luaprogrammer To what extent does it seem that understanding all the gritty-mathy stuff is absolutely required?
Certainly breaking into geometry and vector math is a challenge, yet as far as I’m aware (please correct me if I’m mistaken) it’s perfectly possible to produce a game without diving into the lower levels of geometry and graphics abstraction, i.e. by choosing a pre-built engine or framework that handles the math, the graphics, shaders, physics and all that good stuff for you. Or are you specifically striving toward a position where it’s absolutely required to be able to handle the lower levels of abstraction and implementation details well?
I’ve dabbled a bit into game development Lua back in 2013-2014, and even such a minimal framework like LOVE abstracted away a lot of the stuff I was not prepared to handle right away - which makes me think it’s perfectly possible to produce a good game without explicitly being a great graphics/engine/physics engineer for a brand new engine – especially if you are ok with using something like Unity 5.
I use ROBLOX Studio, so learning vector math, physics, and pathfinding was a struggle, even though it was meant for younger developers like myself…
Don’t try to fly before you have even learned to walk. Start simple, start with 2D games, using something like XNA or something similar, go for small reachable goals that will motivate you to learn more in-depth and advanced things. You do need a good understanding of linear algebra and a few levels of calculus before attempting 3D game programming. But also look into using existing game engines such as Unity.