been making chatGPT teach me GDscript but i need to revamp my learning method

Question

so i felt like i had gained a decent grasp on core coding concepts (variables, if statements, loops) and i familiarized myself with Godot and so i wanted to start making small games to learn more by actually putting the core concepts to practice

i started making a small arcade style beat 'em up that's just 1 simple level with a boss at the end, first i coded the movement and the idle and run animations and it was all good, but then i started to primarily rely on chatGPT to teach me how to implement more simple features like simple attacking and enemy hurt boxes

what i would do is ask it something like "i wanna implement attacking, can you teach me how and explain to me what the code does ?" and at the start it was cool because it would just straight up write me code for attacking and teach me the types of nodes i needed to use, and yeah i still made sure that i actually understood what i was writing, but as time went on i started encountering a ton of problems, the code that chatGPT would write me was correct logically but it rarely worked well in Godot as intended, it'll always do something unexpected and wrong, i would try my best to explain to chatGPT about the feature that i wanted and made sure it actually understood what i wanted, but the logic would always be bugged somehow

and then i would spend an insane amount of hours (6-12 hours) debugging the issue with chatGPT, chatGPT knew how to write logical code for 1 feature but it always didn't work as intended when put in with the other features, always lots of issues

i posted my coding issues twice here and multiple people told me that my coding logic is strange and kinda cluttered

and yeah i started realizing that using chatGPT as a primary tool was a mistake, i could've just searched "how to implement attacks in godot" on youtube and i could've found a straightforward and simpler method for it, chatGPT gave me strange and complex methods that never worked right

it was strange, things like attacks and simple enemy hurt boxes are present in like every game ever, but i was spending like 12 hours just getting the most simple things to work, this does not feel right at all

don't get me wrong, i know the coding basics, and i wanna learn more by actually applying the things i learn in small basic games instead of just entering analysis hell where i would watch like 36 hours of tutorials and then never apply anything

i just need to revamp my strategy and only use chatGPT as more of a side tool for small logical issues and not having him build the whole game for me lol

i'm gonna watch more tutorials on YouTube for the specific things I'm gonna implement, what else could help me learn better ?

Bentley

Answer 1

Ditch the GPT thing completely and minimize your exposure to narrowly focused "how to" tutorials. Instead, enroll in a general purpose programming course that teaches common data structures and algorithms.

Mimosa

Answer 2

I suggest you throw the ChatGPT but not all, I also learn through ChatGPT and Microsoft Bing, but i dont put my trust on both 100% because some codes does not really works.. just take a an idea, or if its a simple one, you can use that.. just dont put all your trust 100% to both Bing and ChatGPT.. I know it.

Cellarer

Answer 3

You can't really learn programming from ChatGPT even if what it spouts was 100% correct (which it never will be). The meat and potatoes of programming is in problem solving. Being presented with ready made code snippets will do almost nothing to improve your problem solving abilities.

Mimosa

Answer 4

I tried using ChatGPT for some problems I had, but 90% of the time the code was not useful/helpful. Not sure how ChatGTP is supposed to work, but sometimes I get the impression it just pastes some code that it learned about. Too often I ended up running in circles: telling it the mistakes it made in code, getting the corrected code, asking for some extended functionality, receiving wrong code from beginning with some extended functionality and so on.

What worked for me the best was to follow complete tutorial series where you create a full (usually something that has only the core mechanics) game. This way you not only learn to code but also how the engine/editor workflow better.

Imho learning only how to do one certain aspect (like in how to tutorials) isn't really helpful in the beginning because in the end you have to make your different things work together.
Later on when you know how to put everything together they of course can be really helpful aswell.

Hygeia

Answer 5

hey thanks a lot for the reply i really appreciate it !

yeah your advice is right and i'll follow it

Bentley

Answer 6

yes i have realized this now

Bentley

Answer 7

yup that's actually smarter

Bentley

Answer 8

It is just the experience I made. Maybe something different will work for you too. I just wanted to show you some options. But I'm glad you figured out that ChatGTP is not a good approach. 🙂

One option to learn more about Godot would be to look at the Demo projects.
There you can see code, how they set up their node hierachy and more.

Here you can download a zip file (scroll down a bit) with all demo projects and infos how to import them:
https://github.com/godotengine/godot-demo-projects

Hygeia