Hey everyone, I'm pretty new to this whole things so hopefully I wont make a fool out of myself, but that besides the point. What I really wanted to ask is how do you know you want to be a game developer mainly in the programming department. Like what are some of the wrong reasons to want to become a game programmer and some of the right reasons to be one. I'm just starting to learn some more things about C (CS 1 class) and to tell you the truth the whole thing is not...interesting to learn at this point (mainly cause I'm not understanding it but still not fun) so now I'm debating if being a game programmer is not the right job for me? Can anyone give me some clues or advice that would help. Thanks in advance for the replies. Sorry also if this was the wrong place to post...the beginners section of the forum didn't feel like the right place to post this type or question

My advice is not to worry about it. If I understand, you're doing the first class where they teach you about C, right?

I didn't really become very interested in programming until the start of my second semester when I started learning C++. I got interested in 3d graphics and I started messing around with a graphics engine. That interest lead to me getting a job in the game industry about 9 months after I graduated.

Don't worry about things not being interesting enough to learn by yourself at the moment, but always be on the lookout for ideas that are interesting. After learning about printf and scanf, use them to create a Guess-the-Number game that uses the 'rand' function to select a number from 1 to 10, and you have to guess it.

It's simple things like this that will help you to learn faster than everyone else, and once you have more knowledge, you'll get interested in more complicated things, and it just leads upwards from there.

If you're in a class I can almost guarantee it won't be interesting to you primarily because they're going to teach you what they think you should know and not what you think you want to learn.

Take whatever they teach you and go home and work with it in a context that does interest you. Not only will you learn the concepts more easily, but you'll be applying them in a real-world situation (ok, not totally real world but close enough).

For example, in high school I took a class on Visual Basic 6. While the general stuff was mildly interesting, I took the concepts home and started working on a game and that ended up being one of the highlights of that year and the spark that started my computer science career.

Yeah, you're not going to learn anything fun about game programming in school. A very, very large percentage of the guys on this board started learning how to program on their own, simply because they wanted to. Find a goal: try to make some simple game or app or whatever interests you, and learn how to do it on your own. You're 100% capable of learning this stuff without a class. Once you start having fun on your own and you have your own personal basis of education, the stuff you learn in programming classes will become more interesting because you'll be able to apply it to the things you're interested in.

Yeah C can be a pain. Wait until you take systems programming and operating systems (if your curriculum has those. Might be named differently). Fun stuff.

Try to understand it. Practice a lot out of class and try to make small programs. The more you program the easier it becomes.

Thanks for all your reply guys it really does help a lot. I've always wanted to do programming on my own but I really don't know where to begin or what exactly to program any advice???

I'm hoping it will get better after I finish learning C. I heard from my BF that C++ is easier than C? So if that's true than I'm REALLY looking forward to it.

Also another problem I have that needs some advice is when you begin a program for a problem say for instants you have to copy the right hand side of a picture and paste it to the left hand side, like where would you begin? So the general question is how do I begin to solve a problem???

bump

Endar nailed it. Find something interesting to you and start from there. You'll learn much faster when it stops feeling like "learning" and becomes "enjoying". Difficult things will seem like more interesting challenges, and things you don't understand at all will be inviting you to unravel their secrets once you understand the basics.

But the prerequisite to all this is a key ingredient any programmer(and arguably, any creator)must have in large quantities: patience. I've seen countless people give up simply because they didn't create something mindblowing after a mere few minutes of work. You shouldn't expect to become comfortable with programming until after at least a few months of passionate coding, and even way after that you'll be nowhere near mastering it. Just don't get discouraged - all major achievements come not from strength but from perseverance! :)

So as others said, just start slow - make a guessing game using basic input+output, and remember to add your own little touches here and there so you can feel it as your own creation. Remember, *anything* you learn in school is only a guideline, like a map someone gives you - you still need to do the exploring on your own.

The real knowledge will come after you stay up a few nights hacking away at your project until the sun comes out, then going to sleep and having lines of code invade your eyelids even as they rest. Then the next day as you're walking to school/work, you get an idea of how to solve that impossible problem from last night, and skip class to return home and implement it. You eventually accomplish your mission and take a break to marvel at the glory of your code, and then you start seeing all these new possibilities for improvement that weren't even there before. Before you know it, you're spending countless nights locked away in your room hacking away at some obscure algorithm while most of your friends are out drinking, and you smile knowing that you're still having the best possible time you could have at that particular moment. I'm sure some other members will have their own perspective, but that's more or less what programming means to me.

Of course, you always have the option of going for another field in game development if you discover programming isn't your thing after all...

Quote: Original post by parfait
Also another problem I have that needs some advice is when you begin a program for a problem say for instants you have to copy the right hand side of a picture and paste it to the left hand side, like where would you begin? So the general question is how do I begin to solve a problem???

Here's how my thinking would go. I need to work with images in that example so I'd find a way to load an image, probably with an image library. I'd get the image into a raw array of pixel data. Then I'd find the width and height of the image using the same image library.

At that point it would be a simple case of treating the raw array as a 2 dimensional array and performing a double for loop to iterate the proper pixels and set the corresponding pixels. Then just save the image using the library.

Without a library and lets say you had to use just use a flavor of BMP then I'd write a loader for it. (The format is trivial) and perform the operations and save the image using my languages IO features.

Quote: Original post by parfait
What I really wanted to ask is how do you know you want to be a game developer mainly in the programming department. Like what are some of the wrong reasons to want to become a game programmer and some of the right reasons to be one.

Let me rephrase the question a few times, hopefully you will see the answer.

* How do you know you want to be a professional football player?
* How do you know you want to be a professional chef?
* How do you know you want to be a professional dancer?
* How do you know you want to be a police officer?
* How do you know you want to be a concert violinist?
* How do you know you want to be an astronomer?
* How do you know you want to be a school teacher?


The answer, which I hope you have realized by now, is that you follow your passions.


A budding chef will find that they read cookbooks all the time for fun. A violin prodigy will enjoy praticing, turning off the TV and computer so they can play their instrument. The school teacher will learn the topics and begin to teach long before they apply to the teaching program at their University.

Please read this post about why a co-worker left games.