@Feindbild: Try participating in some local gamejam, it is fun and you'll see how much you suddenly get done in the last night before deadline, just hacking things together, even though it all started out really nice and clean and professional.

On the topic:
From my experience most people are or want to be designers and while they try to find explanations for why a code snippet works the way it does, they are usually just wrong, due to some very different thinking. And I think it is this wrong understanding and totally different thinking that kinda blocks them from actually learning programming. Not saying they couldn't, but that would mean throwing everything they think they know away and starting from scratch which can be very hard.

Yes, because my way of thinking I had to create as much as the games I made. There was no instructions. Kingdom Hearts introduced me to State Mechanics. And that stuck, but a lot of the understanding of thing is just as made up as the code written with my way of thinking. Blame the "figure it out" message of 3dgs.

I'm pretty sure the whole crux of the issue is simply that game development still relies heavily on programming for the implementation aspect, but the design aspect is what drives most newbs into game development. So all of these guys who have no chops for programming end up getting into game design and spend years twiddling around with designs they can never really realize properly just because they don't know anything about programming and have no interest in learning.

So, why don't many of these newbs ever actually have the drive or chops for programming? For me the answer is simple: because everybody's different, duh. It doesn't matter that programming is "easy". They'll never learn it, just like I will probably never learn painting even though Bob Ross tells me painting is the easiest thing in the world every time he comes on television. And because I consider myself an artistic type I grant to him that it's beautiful and I'm sure I'd enjoy doing it if I knew how, but ultimately it's just not my thing and that's all there is to it.

Some people believe that game design might become wholly separate from programming someday, so that no matter how elaborate the design is, you can rely on not having to program and still end up with a great, unique project at the end, but I'm very skeptical about that. The very fact that games run on computers means that programmers will always be involved in their development in some way, even if software like Unity and Unreal marginalizes their involvement for indies somewhat.

Also, this is a totally minor note, but as incompetent as notch is, he's still WAY more competent than many other successful indie devs out there. Take the guy who made that Five Nights at Freddy's series: every one of those games was made using some software called Multimedia Fusion, which is like Gamemaker except it doesn't even give you the option of using a scripting language (ergo it is ALL visual). But this kind of thing has been the case forever. Surely some of you remember the original Myst? That game was the best-selling PC game of all time until the Sims in the late 90s, and it was built using Hypercard, which was literally a no-code solution for creating interactive slideshows on the Apple Macintosh. Crazy, but it worked. And it meant that they didn't have to program anything.

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I think it is not practical to have such a huge tool/editor that can do everything. You will get a shitload of buttons or such, might as well learn a program language than instead of memorizing them all. Though something like the warcraft 3 world editor would be very powerfull I think, still large but focussing on some genres to not go overkill. Not the easiest thing to get right though...

, when I first read this part I was thinking of Myth , and was like huh??

Haha... good old Bob Ross, time to watch some episodes again (my HDD is full of them!).

My take on this thread's question and topic:

Because you don't have to. Sure, it is undoubtedly helpful to know as much as possible about a single language and esp. programming in general but learning such stuff is hard work for years (depending on your free time).
When game dev is a hobby for you it's likely you come home from school or university or work and just want to have a good time, you want to be creative and maybe put something playable together, an idea which you came up with while working. Most people just don't want to spend even more time "working" then, i.e. learn programming, and that is time (precious free time!) where you cannot work on what great game idea you had earlier that day.

Guys, I wanted to ask for an advice. I want to go deeper into programming (and I want to learn actually, instead of toying with lite-c). So where do I better start from? Maybe some basics to fulfil all knowledge gaps that I have? Maybe you can share your experience, so I could follow you by your footsteps?

Best regards

maybe you should decide to learn what language (e.g. C# or C++), and what for, game development with an existing engine (e.g. Unity or UE4), or something else. it could help our great programmers to help (please select C++ and UE4 then I could utilize the answers you get )

Now it makes me feel bad to tell you that I've already started learning unity..

I want to learn c#, java and javaScript, so I could look for a job (probably related to gamedev). And I've already went through the basics (big thanks to 3dgs_snake), and it seems that c# is actually easier that lite-c

don't feel bad, imo only jcl should feel bad as he can see his - originally not bad - product falling. you simply need a proper modern tool to achieve your aims, and you found a better one on the market, what offers safer future for you.

After Lite-C I would totally recommend to continue with C++. Once you understand most of its basic concepts you should be able to handle any other imperative language without any effort.
You could for example take SDL as base and create a basic 3D game engine with OpenGL in C++ with just some basic features. It is a lot easier than you'd think and you will learn a lot.