Hi everyone, I'm Ced.

To begin with, I am very happy to be a member of this forum and i'm looking forward to interacting with you all. Lately I have been thinking a lot about what I wanted to do with my future, as I lost a few years in school and tried to figure out what i wanted to do. After thinking about it for a while, i chose to persue my passion that is video games, because as far as i can remember I played and love video games since I was even 5 years old.

So as i made my decision, I want to become a game designer. To do so i know that I must acquire many skills in all that involves games and how they are made. So I want to start with game programming.

Since game programming is a big field in itself I want to start at the very beginning with the very basics of game programing.

I would like to ask you to help me in that mather. To be more specific, I would like you to advice me books that are about the basics of game programming and programming languages for games, and how i can efficiantly exerscise the skills I will learn from those books. Any other sugestion is allso welcome, as i will take all the help I can get.

So I'm looking forward to your answers.

Thank you

Although, I am quite a bit older than a Teen, when I started to look at designing a game with graphics I tried to keep it as simple as possible, since I had no place to go a "Raise My Hand" to ask a question. So what I did was, I picked up 3 books that were easy to understand...

1 - " Game Programming for Teens"

2 - " Visual Basic Game Programming for Teens"

3 - "3D Game Programming for Teens"

Each book takes a different approach to the Game Programming world. 1 & 3 Use a Language called BLITZ which is available for free and contains it's Graphics Library. The Full Language Documentation is in the software which re-inforces the books.

1 & 2 is for 2D Graphics using Sprites and both provide FREE Spite sheets to use while learning.

2 Deals which Visual Basic and the DirectX Library and shows you how to implement them.

All 3 build Complete Games which you then can modify and build into your own Game. 1 & 3 do a Arcade style Game while 2 does a RPG with a single charactor.

Good Luck and Happy Programming.

http://www.gamedev.net/topic/641721-new-to-the-forums-start-here/

If you click on the "For Beginners" tab at the top, then the pinned "New to the forums: start here" post, you'll find lots of info too!

Happy Game making...

Before jumping into /game/ programming, I would recommend you take the time to learn the basics. Start with some tutorials in a language of your choice. I would start with python these days. Make some simple console programs first before jumping into graphics. Then once you have the foundation you will be a lot more comfortable learning all that is required to make a game.

As an aside, having a passion playing games doesn't necessarily mean you have a passion making them. I have more of a passion making them then I do playing them, the two are not necessarily equivalent. Anyways, good luck, and I hope you do indeed find it your passion, because there are few things as rewarding as game development in my opinion. =)

Programming is just giving directions/instructions to stuff on a computer.

Do you have a cool game idea? Write it down. Write how you want it to work. Work out the Mechanics. If you have some characters in your game, try to draw them out.

You can even prototype your game with pieces of paper.

Do all of this before you even touch a computer.

Now that you have an idea, and how it works, you need to learn programming basics. I am not talking about learning a specific language, because they all work generally the same (I have used at least 4), but the SYNTAX is different. All programming is is INSTRUCTIONS (like in a recipe). You can start here:

http://snapguide.com/guides/understand-computer-programming/

So now you know how programming works. If you want to make a game, you need a game engine to practice in (These usually have designated programming languages).

Unity3D uses Jacascript and C++ I believe.

https://store.unity3d.com/?gclid=CKjVk_GGrroCFSlo7AodaRMApQ

I use Maratis3D. It uses LUA as a scripting langauge and C++ as it's main programming language.

http://www.maratis3d.org/

Blender (the modeling software) uses Python (It has a game engine in it)

http://www.blender.org/

You have 2D game making engines also. My favorite is GAMEMAKER STUDIO.

http://www.yoyogames.com/studio

But to make your game pretty, you will surely need some art skills. If you can't do it, then get help from someone who can.

Hi everyone and thank you for your answer.

I know I'm late to reply sorry.

Since I started this topic i downloaded the book "Game programming for teens 3rd edition" it is the one suggested by Poighan.

So as I made my way through the introduction part of the book, i quickly hit a wall with game programming as Segmented sayed in his post . Since I didn't know anything about game programming, I picked up smallBasic by ms. It is the simpler version of visual basic. So now I'm practicing with it to build up some good basic skills in programming. I would like to get in e-mail contact to all who replyed to this message. So I can ask you for help whenever I have a problem with programming, and allso you guys could advice me further.

Thanks everyone. I hope to hear from you again.