The "easiest" game you could make is a 2D shooter.

Even than, it's not easy. The first thing you need to do in order to program a game is understand how programming works. Nothing is taken for granted and everything has to be "explained". There's not a gravity command you can use that will make your character rest on a platform or fall down when in the air. Hell, there isn't even air without you giving it certain attributes. Thing is that even when successfully assigning attributes to a certain object, it'll eventually conflict with another.

Sure, you can use tutorials and such, but that means you're not making something unique. The day you're faced with a certain challenge and you figure it out by yourself for the first time will probably be one of the best moments in your life...

That being said, don't start with C++. Try using Flash (AC) first and work yourself up from there. Or you could keep using the platform as it's quite capable after AC3 was released. Either way, stick with it and don't be discouraged if something doesn't work out the way you want it. It's very much trial-and-error across the board.

Good Luck!

^ Yeah...So I guess by summer, I could learn at least SOMETHING....That Raptor game actually looks fun...=-)

About the easiest program you can produce which can be defined as a number guessing game which (in pseudo code) is the following:

After that producing the following games with ASCII graphics is a decent challenge for the beginner programmer:

• Tic-Tac-Toe
• Solitare
• Chess
• Checkers
• Battleship
• Poker
• Black Jack

When you have finished that, you will (probably) want to move onto basic 2D graphic versions of those games. After you are growing (amazingly) tired of turn based games it is time for you to move onto cloning games like Pong and Asteroids.

I heard Battleship is annoying to make, is this true??

I made it in University in assembly using the Motorola 68000 assembly language on an Atari ST with full graphics and mouse input ... It's not that annoying to make but it is more complicated than you would first assume

Just ditch it and learn Java instead. Much more flexible.

Hey you guys I want to start some programming. Where do I start. I think BASIC is good but what do you guys recommend.

Has anyone ever used Scheme?
I just finished an intro programming class and we used Scheme. How does it compare to other languages?

If you're learning a new language I would aviod Basic; I would learn Java, C# of C++ because they're so similar in syntax and together represents (roughly) 90% of all programming done today.

Scheme is very similar to LISP. Both are known as functional programming languages, a quite different paradigm from imperative and OOP. I think Scheme is a good language to learn about functional programming.

I recommend that anyone who wants to be serious about programming should learn about all the major paradigms. If you learn the following paradigms, your programming knowledge will be quite good already:

- imperative (i.e. C)
- OOP - Object Oriented Programming (i.e. C++, C#)
- functional (i.e. scheme, lisp)
- logical (i.e. Prolog)
- assembly code (i.e. x86, MIPS)

As a summary of several things I said in this thread, I believe the three core things which define a good programmer are:

1- knowing about algorithms, data structures and at least the basics of computational complexity (these three things are heavily related)
2- knowing how to use different paradigms of programming (see list above), and knowing what each one is good for.
3- having a lot of practice with a few programming languages, preferably from different paradigms

These three things are much more important than knowing a lot of programming languages. As an example, I haven't programmed in Java for years, and I wouldn't say I'm an expert on it, but since I know some similar languages (C++, C#), I'd quickly be able to start using Java productively if I had to.