Shinlock said:
if you just want to make little games to impress your friends and you don't care about pc hardware, learning directX or dealing with memory managemnet. C# with XNA should be your port of call, you'll get your game on. If you decide yes for here, ignore below.
if you want to one day be a professional game programmer. I'd recommend learning in order
- Pascal (this language forces you to code proper-procedural structured code. its also very strict with typecasting which will force you to think about data structures and datastructure types which is important in gaming)
- C (you'll get the ability to carry over what you learned from pascal in respect to structure with the added ability of shooting yourself in the foot if you aren't careful).
- C++ & C# (C# is stricter with OO models and useful for tool deving for your game)
for languages.. for api's I'd most likely start off with using allegro when you hit C then progress to directX once you are happy in allegro. when you move to C++, learn STL and have a look at the BOOST library.
Pointers are lovely, alot of programmers (esp unigrads) are very scared of them. I guess you should be, stuffing up your pointer arithmatic = painful debugging but if you treat your pointer code with the upmost respect you'll get rewarded with blistering speed.
Above all else, whatever you decide, code as many games as possible, even if they are stupidly simple. Tetris clone #123123 and Space Invaders clone #1231241232 is worth your time to code up, you'll learn alot from it. do _not_ attempt to build 3d graphics & games until you've mastered simple 2d games from tetris to your mario clone.
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thanks. i'll remember those two things. but i'm not sure about becoming a game developer as a profession. i would still have to think about that.
