I'm thinking about programming a game. A little background.. I initially started taking Comp Sci courses in college, but later decided that Business (Project Mgmt specifically) was a better idea as it's easier to demonstrate programming skills on your own than it is business/management skills. The programming classes in the Business program are.. lacking. I don't really have the time/money to take classes outside of my major and I'm not going to minor in anything. I decided the best way is to just hunker down in my free time and start learning programming and actually make something. I'm a big fan of the research/iterate process so I don't care if I start out small.. I know i can always make adjustments and expand until I have something I'm happy with. I definitely don't expect to crank out a masterpiece overnight. I would like to eventually release something commercially, but even if not, I think getting a good handle on programming would help my career, even if I'm not a professional programmer. I've been hanging out in the forums a bit and noticed this is a pretty knowledgeable group, so I thought I'd ask here. I'm looking for advice on where to start, good books to get, or even just your own experiences.
Okay, ill do my best for you, based on the mistakes and successes ive had learning to program games here's a little of MY background. I go to Ferris State University for Digital Animation and Game Design (silly, i know). I started out modeling, but had to take a programming course wherein i learned C#. 3 years later, i finally grasped the concept of OOP and making games. I finished my 4th year last year and am not really close to graduating lol. Some things that REALLY helped me learn to program, aside from having an AWESOME teacher that responds to every email quickly and thuroughly. XNA is really great if you know C#. It sets up the bare bones for you, and with a little learning you can set up your own game states and stuff. Visual Studio is a fantastic learning IDE. With intellesense, you can see every method, property, etc etc attached to every object. For instance, i make a Player class. When i instantiate a player object and refer to it as "player", i can type "player. " and when i press that period, it'll show me everything i can put after that that it knows about. This is great for scope as well as making your own methods, because it will show you what your methods require to be passed in. Another easy learning tool is Processing (processing.org). It uses Java and is basically a tiny IDE with libraries that make learning easy without the fuss of learning complicated syntax and things like that. For instance, here's a bit of code that creates a green circle and makes it follow my mouse Code: void draw() { background(0); noStroke(); fill(0,255,0); ellipse(mouseX, mouseY, 10, 10); //10 for width and height respectively } bam, thats it. Its quick, its OOP, and it can do some cool things (check out http://www.openprocessing.org/ to see what people are doing with it). since it's java, you can easily import java libraries, like jBox2D and some minim stuff. Here's something i made in processing. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nuHmMh3vXhU Another thing, LEARN LINEAR ALGEBRA. You'll need it. Almost every game needs it, you need it for collision and other fancy things. Wolfire made a cool couple of posts on it that get you the gist of it http://blog.wolfire.com/2009/07/linear- ... rs-part-1/ there's 3 parts, read them all. Hopefully this gives you some inspiration. also, books are cool too. my final word of advice: MAKE GAMES. Nothing will teach you better than actually honing your skills yourself. Take it from me. You also won't get a job/internship without something to show for yourself. I encourage anyone with more wisdom than I to point out anything i said that was wrong. Edit: Also, unity. Its really easy to deal with and put out proof of concepts and you can program in java or C#
Make things, doesn't matter what it is just start making stuff. Books are good for reference but many are crap out there. Ones that step though making a project are painful because they typically present the problems with one solution when this is really not the case. Many students fall into the pitfall of memorizing the book without really undstanding why they do what they do and fail miserably when the problem is changed slinky from the book. It's much easier to learn to programming with a goal in mind, "I want to make a program that can sort image files by what colors they use", "I want to make a Raiden clone", "I have streaming data that needs to me made into human readable text from an analogue device" Once you have a task it becomes a bit easier to figure out language you want to use and what libraries needed to hone in the task. I find python works good for many prototypes, quick to write small powerful scripts. C/C++for a more refined and faster implementation as necessary. Meh ill look in the morning if any of this post makes sense
