What things can be done for fun indoors, as someone with autism?
What things can be done for fun indoors, as someone with autism?
So i have autsim and dyslexia, also depression and i just feel like a loser who cant do anyhting im trying not to think that way but its hard. i also spend most of my time indoor becasue i dont like going outdoors plus its hot out there.
Ive been wanting to make games or something like that but i litteraly cant code or understand it and ive been reserching game dev for mouths, i also feel like im very limited, like for example my pc is low end or tha tim too scared to drive and idk how to. I just want to do somet hign creative that i can show with others wihtout having to go outside. im kinda nerd but not a very smart one, so theres that.
why must life be soo hard and sad?
I always suggest origami for these questions.
It's cheap, you only need paper.
It can be as simple or complex as you'd like it to be.
Plenty of free resources available online.
Doesn't need a lot of space, just a table.Something like drawing or digital painting might appeal to you. Neither require a powerful computer (or even a computer at all if you use physical materials) and are inexpensive to get into.
Another thing I personally like doing is baking! Gives my mind something to do and I get tasty treats at the end that I can have myself or share.
I second the painting, its great, you can give it your full attantion, or you can watch something or listen to podcasts/audiobooks while you do it. Plus a game needs to start somewhere, and i think art is a good starting point. Draw what you imagine the game to be, make maps, create design documents with notes for systems, interactions, ui ect. Programming for me is much easier at that point because you already know what you want to achive, and can start with a specific goal in mind
I second the baking. It helped me out of a massive depression. I dont have the patience for things that take a long time to see results (e.g. gardening) or for things where failure doesn't produce something useful (e.g.painting). Baking sees results quickly and it's almost always tasty, even with mistakes.
You got dealt a bad hand. I can commiserate. One thing I've learned about that is to stop blaming myself for everything. It's not your fault that you struggle with your issues. Try to love yourself as much as possible. Negative thoughts lead to more negative thoughts and eventually to depression.
As for making a game, I think I have a good starting point for you. Take a look at Gameboy Studio. You can make playable games without knowing how to code.
Another nice tool for making games is Bitsy. It's very basic by design, to try to help folks get right into the process without getting too tangled in the weeds of programming languages and more detailed 2D and 3D graphics and the like.
Some really interesting little games have been made with it!
I do cross stitch which is a low barrier to entry IMO
And there are a bunch of nerdy patterns on etsy
Cough cough cough [email protected]
Just saying 😄
No way, I just saw this morning that Harvard has a free online course in game development, and it's available now. You should take a look and see if it interests you :)! You can do it from home.
https://pll.harvard.edu/course/cs50s-introduction-game-development
By the way, I also suffer from depression and I know how hard it is. I hope in the dark times you can find some compassion for yourself. I know for me, making it through the day sometimes is an accomplishment in and of itself. Try to see if you can practice not calling yourself a loser even when you feel like it. You are not a loser, you may be struggling right now, but if you saw a friend going through what you're going through, would you call them a loser? Probably not. I try to replace those thoughts with "today, I'm not feeling like I'm where I want to be, but I'm doing the best I can, and that's enough."
Anyway, wishing you well and I hope you can find some peace.
Doesn't that one require or at least recommend that you have prior knowledge of code language and that you have gone the previous cores?
Or am I miss reading? or is it exaggerating what knowledge you need?
Personally, I'm trying anyway because hey free course.
It says prior programming experience or you can also take their entry level computer science course which is also free: https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-computer-science-harvardx-cs50x
It says nearly 5 million people have enrolled in that comp sci course so it must be a pretty good one.
By the way, many colleges do this, so it wouldn't hurt to shop around as well. I know Yale for one has quite a few free courses.
Free until September 15th! Get your learning in now
Learn to do card tricks
Oh god the driving thing was the Bane of my existence for YEARS. I basically made myself a desensitization program so I could learn to drive. Everyday I would sit behind the wheel with the car off until that wasn't scary. (Took about a week.)Then the next step would be turning the car on (another fews days.) Next was putting it in gear but not going anywhere. Then pulling forward and backwards etc... until I could go out on the roads and get my learners.
This whole process took over a month. If I freaked out I had to go back to the previous step. I based all this off of animal desensitization programs becuase I am Autistic AF. Sorry for the wall of text but I wanted to give you some advice and hope for the future!
If you want there is a community for autism!
You are more than welcome there.
thanks for letting me know that.
No problem. They are an amazing community. Hope to see you over there.
Hey there, sorry to hear you're struggling.
I was kind of toying around with some of the same interests before I went back to school. Have you thought about web design/development?
It's easy to get started, and there is near limitless freedom in your ability to create things both from a visual, and front design perspective and a also ton of different programming languages for building apps. You can go full stack and do a bit of everything, or specialize in just about anything (seriously - design/ux, frontend development, backend development, devops, databases, digital maps, digital signage, salesforce, analytics, etc etc).
At the very least, it might act as a gateway to upping your programming skills. Once you get more experienced if you find game development is still something you want to pursue, there is no shortage of javascript-based game engines 🤓
I've been doing web development for the past 7 years and I'm still getting my mind blown and learning new things every day. I love it.
Whatever it is you choose to pursue, don't give up! Keep taking small steps, building small projects, and learning new things. It may not feel like you're getting everywhere but it's so satisfying once you start to feel the pieces come together.
You've got this.
Im autistic and not currently dyslexic but have struggled with it in the past due to some other health issues.
Anyways, feeling you hard on this with the coding especially. I started trying to learn to code back in 98 I think with simple HTML as a kid. Failed. Python. Fail. Ruby slight success? BASH scripts. Fail.
I’ve always found it hardest that I can learn to read these languages but not write them. Same with German.
Arduino? Yes please. GRBL for CNC and 3D printers? All right that’s more me.
I’ve found it’s very important for my brain to have something “real” involved with the programming. Making a servo move or an LED blink clicks in my brain way better than an programmatic output on the computer.
You can get a desktop CNC or 3D printer for just a few hundred bucks to get started with a learnable platform. Or an arduino starter kit for 50$.
Are you talking about indoors at home, or are you willing to go somewhere indoors? If so, you could pick up playing pool, darts, or bowling. They're all fun and you don't really have to be good at them to enjoy them.
I would try turning learning into a hobby. Think of all the subjects you want to know about, find people on YouTube who knows about them, and subscribe to them. If you want to know about game design, subscribe to game development and coding channels. There are passionate people covering every topic you can imagine trying to share their love for the subject, if you can find them. The more you learn, the easier it will be, and the more motivated you will be to try things.
While I agree, I'd also like to point out that learning on YouTube, while an absolutely viable option, strenghtens different learning mechanisms than written sources. Also, using YouTube exposes you to what the platform wants you to do - that is, consume as much content as possible without necessarily getting anything out of it, which might get in the way of actually learning.
The main risk of, let's call it "Social media learning" is that it very easily (very very easily) turns into entertainment, which is the opposite of actually studying.
Grab an Elegoo Arduino kit on Amazon and start there to get started on the coding journey! Follow Paul McWhorter's Arduino tutorials on YouTube. You can program the Arduino from knowing NOTHING about electronics and coding. He teaches you from square one as if you had zero knowledge. I'm on lesson 35 myself and it's addicting! Coding something yourself and watching it work is amazing! I've even used what he taught me to develop a temperature sensor for my house that helps alert me when the pipes underneath my house get too cold during the winter. It's going to help so much and be such a valuable machine.
I make board games and card games, and I've put several of them into Tabletop Simulator. It's on Steam and you don't have to know any coding. It's not super intuitive, but with some instructional youtube videos, I've managed. Its normally $20 but sometimes goes on sale for $10.
Sorry you're feeling down. I've been there.
I have a few friends who used to go to game jams, which are competitions where you or a group compete to make a video game in a set time frame. A lot of the people who went to them were programmers, but there were also artists, writers, musicians, etc. that participated as part of groups. If you have any interest or talent in things like that, there's other avenues to get involved in making games besides being a code monkey.
As far as actually learning to code, if you want to continue pursuing that, you may be jumping in too deep, you gonna learn to crawl before you can walk, and walk before you can run. Unless you're a real prodigy, you're probably not going to be able to make much of anything beyond a basic text-based game for months or years from starting to learn programming. Start small, basically every game dev or software developer out there started with a "hello world" program at some point that literally just prints those words on your screen and literally nothing else. There's a lot of options out there to learn from, but you need to start from somewhere and follow the whole track before you understand enough to make a game from scratch.
You may not have to start totally from scratch depending on what you want to get out of the experience, there are some games and tools that require little or no coding knowledge to do some pretty cool stuff with that you can play around with.
As far as non-video game stuff, I took up painting minis for my d&d games over COVID. I wouldn't consider myself to be an artsy person, but I'm doing alright. I started with the reaper minis learn to point kits. Even if you don't play tabletop games, it's a pretty fun hobby on its own. From there I started getting into gaslands, where you modify and paint hot wheels cars to use in the game. There's of course also traditional model kits you can do, and related hobbies like model railroading.
You can also get into cooking, I dabble in a lot of hobbies but if your goal is to show off, nothing gets a bigger reaction than something tasty.
Depending on how much workspace you have available and your tools and materials budget, you can also get into various types of woodworking, leatherwork, sewing, basket weaving, electronics, painting/drawing, writing, jewelry making, metalworking, fly tying (even if you don't fish yourself, they're pretty neat to look at,) making terrarium, the list goes on. Basically you just need to pick something you think is neat that you'd want to make and figure out how to do it.
Do you have a special interest?
not really i want to do things like make a game but as i said im limted to what i have and i cant code, ive also wanted to make a movie but idk how to edit or even how to do movie making, i just keep wanting to do something creative but idk.
I think your goals are too big and you’re burning yourself out. As an autistic person it’s very easy to burn yourself out, very different than a neurotypical person.
I’m autistic, ‘high functioning’ but I definitely wasn’t when I was younger.
I’ve found that taking it easy is the best approach. You’re born with the innate ability to push yourself too hard. A very useful skill when running from a predator but not as useful for long term goals.
Paradoxically, focusing on how to do less will allow you to do more. Finding little shortcuts in life that over time add up.
For example, every morning I need 2 hours to putter about. Just do absolutely nothing to prepare for my day. A lot of the time, an entire day on the weekend will also be dedicated to doing aimless, random tasks.
I used to hate myself for it and just feel so useless. But now I recognize that it’s just something I have to do to function. I view it as a positive because it’s when I have some of my best ideas. Back when I used to hate myself for it, I wouldn’t have any good ideas because I was so focused on feeling bad.
Also, measure success in as many ways as possible. For example, let’s say you’re having a tough day and you get almost nothing done. That’s a win. Even though you were having a tough day, you got something done.
Remember that easy is an effort. Easy on a good day looks very different from easy on a bad day.
If you keep it easy, one day you’ll wake up and realize that easy has changed. The stuff you used to think was hard is the new easy and you’re reaching places you never thought you could.