Tomcat But, just for creating games, I'd add art basics, which is forgotten even more often than math. 🎨
Yeah, art fundamentals are heavily neglected among aspiring indie developers. It's almost impossible to make a decent game without stuff like basic visual design principles or Disney's 12 principles of animation. To make things more complicated, art fundamentals are not mere knowledge. They're somewhat intangible and applying them competently requires skills and sensibilities that can only be developed through continuous practice. Relying on tutorial format to "get you there" is somewhat of a fool's errand.
This is a key part of the "tutorial hell" problem. For example, many people try to learn 3d asset production via Blender tutorials. Following those tutorials, they're able to make visually pleasant things. However, once the learner goes on to repeat the process on their own, they get disappointed with the results even though they did all the same "steps" the lecturer had shown in the tutorial. They cannot figure out why their own attempts fall short. In search for answers they then switch to the next tutorial in the queue, repeating this ad nauseum, missing the crux of the problem time and again.
The secret ingredient, of course, is keeping the visual side of things constantly in check by application of visual fundamentals in every micro decision made throughout the production process. Tutorials typically only present upfront technical parts of the process. They're much easier to communicate to wide audiences and lend themselves naturally to the "how to" approach. But under the hood, the lecturer tacitly uses their visual skills to make the result look good.
Are such tutorials good or bad? The promise of nice visuals does indeed inspire, but the path to actually get there cannot really be found in the tutorial.
