I need advice about my coding career!

Fusion is great to get into the logic of programming and you get working prototypes done super quickly. My advice is: Use both. If you wanna learn a programming language Unity or Godot are probably the most popular engines, but don’t expect results as fast as in Fusion.

Unity is far superior to Fusion in every respect but one - the ease (and speed) with which you can create very simple projects (I personally believe that anything more complex, even if it is possible in Fusion, will end up more difficult and time consuming than it would in other engines).

I'd say try Unity, and if you can wrap your head around it, then go with it.
Personally, I used Clickteam products for decades (since Klik 'n' Play), and have since written my own WebGL2-based game engine from scratch in Javascript, but when I tried Unity, I found the interface completely unfathomable and quickly gave up on it.

Since you mention college, around here at least, if you were to study game development, Unity is the tool that colleges would have you use (obviously that's not relevant if you're only interested in a more general computer science course).

I'm going to plug Please login to see this link. here. I think Godot is pretty easy to pick up and a good choice for someone wanting to go from Fusion into coding. It's open source and continually being worked on. Worth a look.

Quote from Julian82

Fusion is great to get into the logic of programming and you get working prototypes done super quickly. My advice is: Use both. If you wanna learn a programming language Unity or Godot are probably the most popular engines, but don’t expect results as fast as in Fusion.

Julian, will you be sticking with Fusion 2.5 for your next game or are you ready for more advanced stuff / engines?

Very likely yes, cuz for the kind of games that are on my mind, there’s nothing Fusion doesn’t offer. Learning another engine, especially with coding, would throw me back a couple of years, feelings too old to afford that XD after the game’s console release in June, I’ll take a brake to focus on improving my pixel art skills anyway.

Quote from Julian82

Learning another engine, especially with coding, would throw me back a couple of years, feelings too old to afford that

Yes I can relate to that. I'm feeling the rust myself. Julian, I read that you worked on Outbuddies while working full-time? What sort of work do you do? Is it in computers / programming or is it totally unrelated to making games?

Totally unrelated, I’m a psychiatrist XD But I cut down my workload to 30hrs/week to manage Outbuddies in parallel. Still too many hours in total, the project consumes up to 25hrs a week, and if it continues to fail financially on consoles, I’ll not be able to continue like this. So a lot of things are unclear atm. I also feel commercial projects are completely different to doing things on a casual or semi-casual basis. Suddenly you’ve partners, investments that need to be paid back, and those are huge for being on consoles. Professional marketing also costs an insane amount of money. The need to meet deadlines is very much there, to not mess up the team schedule. I’m longing to go back to the days where I could just prototype things, mess around, enjoy my time. With Fusion I now feel at least confident enough to reach out for project funding and investors, if you do so, Kickstarter included, you better be sure you can deliver, there are many bad stories out there of devs that could not, and they’re after you forever then XD Porting the game with Clickteam was quite straightforward so far, Switch and Xbox are already running in good quality. It’s only semi-automated and demands a lot of work on both sides, but definitively doable. I’ll do a write up/ postmortem for sure when the game is out!

Quote from Julian82

if it continues to fail financially on consoles...

Thanks for sharing your experience, Julian. There are a lot of YouTube videos of Outbuddies... It didn't do well on the PC? There're so many other things involved in making a game (besides coding) that can make it very hard for an indie dev to actually finish a game. I just don't see myself using anything other than Fusion at this point. I look forward to your postmortem.

I just got into CF2.5 and I am liking it very much. I am not sure about more superior game engine that require real programming like unity or unreal.

But all I can say is that, games is not all about complex programming. Many gamer know nothing about programming, they only judge how you present the game as in graphics, sound, effects vfx, game play etc..
I mean even a simple game like flappy bird can get famous and jelly crush app made more than a billion dollar and these games can be made with CF2.5.

It just depends on the scale and depth of games you want to make.