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Crash Course in Game Programming?

Posted by Cliff on from the a-pointer-in-the-right-direction dept.

Lullabye_Muse asks: "I want to write a game program for an independent research class I am taking at my High School. I have until June to deliver a final product or a good demo. I'm somewhat new to programming and will be doing work at home, and at school (Linux and Windows, so cross platform OSS is best). What is the best language to learn to code games in, and do you have suggestions for any useful sites, on game programming?"

3 of 142 comments (clear)

  1. New To Games? by johnkoer · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Since you said you are new to programming, you might want to consider taking on an OSS game that is already out there and modifying it to suit your purpose. It will help you learn a lot of the basics of programming, but it will also give a great starting point.

    If you are dead set on writing an entire game yourself, best of luck to you. Even for an experienced programmer, throwing together a game (or even a demo) in three - four months is a feat.

    --
    Johnkoerner.com
    1. Re:New To Games? by _pruegel_ · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I disagree. I believe modifying most OSS games out there requires more knowledge and most importantly more time and effort than writing a simple game from ground up. Those games might have huge code bases and usually there is little documentation especially for starters.
      The author of this "Ask Slashdot" did not mention "First Person Shooter" or even 3D at all. And there are games which are very simple but still fun. Games like Pong, Mine Sweeper, Snake and many more can each be done in a couple of hours. There are even programming languages made for simple game development although I would prefer a "real" language like Java or Python. I once wrote a small game to learn Tcl/Tk and that was fun and I did it in less then a day.

  2. It's going to need to be simple.... by Grygonos · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If you're new to programming, and actually want to code this yourself, it's going to need to be a simply game with little to no graphics. Implementing a OpenGL game is NO trivial task. A game I did in Java was the simple squares game where the object is to arrange the pieces like so .. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 * So I wrote a Java app that would mix up the squares like so 4 7 2 * 1 8 6 5 3 and allow you to move the pieces around via the *blank* square. This still wasn't trivial, especially for someone new to Java, much less programming in general. Not trying to disparrage your efforts, but being new to coding is probably your biggest disadvantage.