Learn game development by shipping one small game in four months
Four months of regular practice — about 45 minutes a day on the free Godot engine, guided by the best free tutorials there are — gets a complete beginner from nothing to one small, finished, released game. Roughly 80 hours total. You will not have built the next indie hit, and you will not be employable at a AAA studio. You will have done the one thing that almost everyone who "wants to make games" never does: finished one.
4 months · ~80 hours · one small finished game, exported and released
1.Godot, and its official "Step by step" guide
Download Godot. It is free, open source under the MIT licence, has no royalties or sign-up, and the whole editor is a download of well under a hundred megabytes. Then work straight through the official "Step by step" getting-started series, which teaches nodes, scenes, signals, and your first GDScript, and finishes by walking you through building a complete little 2D game. Build it for real in the editor — do not just read. This is the canonical, always-current introduction, maintained by the people who make the engine.
Free
Godot · Step by step →2.Brackeys' Godot beginner tutorials
The docs teach you the engine; Brackeys teaches you how a real game comes together. After years as the most-watched Unity educator, Brackeys returned specifically to make free Godot tutorials, and his "How to make a video game" beginner series is the single best video on-ramp there is — player movement, level building, enemies, scoring, death and respawn, sound, and exporting, in about an hour and a quarter. Follow along building it yourself, then change something: different art, an extra mechanic. The moment you modify the tutorial game is the moment you start actually learning.
Free
Brackeys on YouTube →3.Ship one small game — and actually finish it
This is the entire point of the page. Pick a scope so small it feels embarrassing — one screen, one mechanic, no menus you don't need: a single-screen platformer, a falling-blocks puzzle, a tiny top-down dodge game. Build it, then do the unglamorous last 20% nobody does: a title screen, a win and lose state, sound, and an exported build you can hand to a friend. Upload it to itch.io. A finished bad game teaches you more than ten abandoned ambitious ones. Resist scope creep with everything you have.
Free; itch.io is free to publish on
itch.io →If this doesn't fit you
If your specific goal is a job at a games studio rather than making your own games, lean toward Unity instead — it still dominates studio job listings, and its C# is a transferable, marketable language. Use the free, official Unity Learn platform, starting with the "Create with Code" course, and shore up the language itself through C#. The "finish one small game" rule applies identically; only the engine changes.
Why this path
The thing that stops aspiring game developers is never the engine or the language — it is that they start ten projects and finish none, each one bigger and vaguer than the last. The bottleneck is scope and follow-through, not skill. Godot is the right first engine because it is free, light, and has no friction; the official docs and Brackeys get you building fast; and the final phase exists solely to force you across the finish line on something tiny. Shipping one finished game, however small, teaches you the whole loop — design, build, polish, release — that no tutorial can. Skip it and you will have watched game development without ever having done it.