Hey yall, I'm honestly still pretty unskilled at programming, and I have a ambitious idea that I probably cannot accomplish on my own without dedicating a lot of time away from my real life job and other equally and more important goals. I have some basics of python and GMS2's language, but I have pretty much only just begun with learning how to use Godot effectively. I want to make a very complicated (to me at least, lol) state machine that handles player input and feedback like in the street fighter series, KoF series, or other 2d fighting games made by Arc system works. I have a really crude project that has some basic debugging features and I have made a very flawed and disorganized state machine that almost achieves what I want but at the cost of being hard to read and hard to implement with other parts of my game I want to eventually make, or at least give my best shot at making. I have kind of a roadmap in my head of the things I would need to do to make my game playable as that is the overall goal, and this is the first and most important thing.

My ideas right now on how I can succeed in making this is to either

  • Hire someone to code for me and bugtest the project myself to guide them as they do revisions at a price point that is financially responsible

  • Hire someone to proofread and improve on my own code in a holistic manner so I can learn how to do what I need for my project on my own after assistance

  • Watch my pet snails eat algae and mate while daydream about my game with Godot open in the background

So anyways jokes aside I am trying to be realistic here, I am just so pathetic at staying focused on coding on my own at this point in my life and I have no friends or connections that are either proficient with game development in Godot or have the time to teach me / do things for me for a fair price. I am much better in every job I have ever done except making music working as a team leader or a teammate so I really think I need to find a way to use that to do this thing I want to do. Since I want to try to get more people or at the very least people assisting me on the idea I want to somehow hire or just involve a freelance developer. What do you all suggest I do? I want to know more about how much people doing this job get paid because I can't imagine that people that want to give people code for commercial use would just do it for free unless there was a good reason in doing it for free, and tutoring & consultation jobs like what I am thinking could apply here are a very honest and important side gig and I would like to compensate people who dedicate time to other's success if they want to help me. I was thinking of what a reasonable budget would be for a job like this where I am asking for someone to code a small part of a greater whole of a project but I have no idea what the thing I am asking for is worth to a developer and It's hard to know if I am even in the ball park because someone on Fiverr I paid 50 dollars to create this I ended up cancelling the order because they either couldn't follow my instructions because they were not written well enough or they didn't understand what I was asking for somehow so they created a vastly different code than what I had in mind, but at the same time I have had a friend of mine tell me that making a state machine that works the way I want is a feasible thing to do on my own but I lack the motivation to self teach with things like youtube tutotials and online forums, it's just so easy for me to just totally lose focus on sitting around in a chair trying to find out what the heck I did that broke everything when I could be doing something social or make some Drum n Bass in FL on my days off or my time between my shifts.

Anyway yall, I'm just not succeeding at learning programming on my own for a variety of reasons and its really frustrating me and I just had a really silly silly time trying to hire someone on fiverr so I ask the community of the IDE i am trying to make my cool kusoge game in for guidance after my 14 hour work day before i forget pleasse feel free to ask me any questiojns and I will answer them honestly and in the order of which i feel like answering them in with no hard feelings if i fall asleep after feeding my snails thanks very very much for reading my unproofread post I legit just want any insight on this at all im so lost on what I should do from multiple perspectives

If you have the budget you can pay someone to do it for you, if you can't talk to someone to help you in exchange for a certain percentage of the project's profits

    el_malo in your opinion, where is a good place to talk to people who can help me in exchange for the profits of the project? I want to get in contact with as many people that can help me out as possible.

        I'm a "do it myself" guy so I'll tackle your last option with my answer.

        state machines are incredibly useful in general and learning how to use them will help with everything you ever make going forward, fighting game or not. it helps to break things down into super manageable chunks, for example: just make a state machine that tracks whether the player is moving or not. when you get that settled, extend it to include a jumping state, and then after that a simple attack state. if you slowly put together these individual pieces you'll eventually end up with a single functional character... which you can then use to easily create more characters rapidly.

          samuraidan well i made one but it's just a bunch of if else statements and it's confusing to debug, is there a better way to script one or like make one with different statements that can do more things?

              jamuel_samuel ah, that's a problem with code structuring. everything boils down to an if-else statement if you think about it hard enough. it helps to break things down into as many separate functions as possible, so that instead of a wall of text you have something closer to:

              if state == idle:
player_idle()
elseif state == walking:
player_walking()

              breaking things down like that will also solve your debug problem, because you can look at one function at a time instead of a giant wall of text.

              and this is more advanced, but if you get really good at making functions work indepently from each other, you can make your components by attaching a script to an empty node, letting you re-use stuff on other objects. then instead of player_idle() you'd call $idle_component.idle()

              that will help with not only having to make the code one time to use anywhere.. but also having the code in seperate files, making it way easier to read.

                jamuel_samuel Look in programming forums like this, and especially if near your location there are people who are useful for your project and you will present the idea.