Hello all,

I posted a question here many months ago and since then I have landed a job in web development (wait, let me finish )

So I've learnt a heck of a lot of techniques by using PHP. I have actually come at PHP from a C++ programming perspective as this is the language I started off learning.

Needless to say I've picked up the language extremely quickly and very confident in working with OOD, fairly complex classes, structures, references, pointers, memory management (from C++ background) multidimensional arrays etc.

Although C++ is a completely different beast than PHP I feel fairly confident I have picked up many of the nitty gritty design and implementation techniques to start programming for the desktop. I have built a partial network sniffer console application (raw winsock) so I've had some experience going low level.

I am hoping for some advice, currently I am looking at something on the lines of Librocket or SFGUI for UI/GUI design as I am very interested in designing for the desktop (I have only ever worked in console based applications).

Librocket purely due to my HTML5 and CSS3 skills.

SFGUI I am considering due to the fact that I am also considering using SFML for 2D game development.

Further down the line I am hoping to develop within Blender using its game engine (Python) as I do want to be able to jump over to 3D and use what Blender has to offer.

Essentially, what does this path sound like? Am I being too ambitious or thinking straight? There is a heck of a lot of libraries and frameworks out there and I do want to develop GUIs and also 2D games (SFML, interesting in working with graphics). I would love to develop landscapes, animation and models within Blender eventually too.

Thanks for all the input

My opinion is that you should go download blender, make your first game with it using primitive shapes. Something like a 3D block breaker or 3D pong, python takes a week to learn the basics.

There are huge amounts of tutorials for making simple games with blender.

Forget about the rest and make that 3D game, the largest difference between 2D and 3D is the concept of meshes and animations.

Then if you want you can learn 3D modeling, if you understand 2D art you will already have a good start towards 3D.

If you don't want to spend four to five years learning how to make a proper 3D model and instead wan't to focus on programming, then buy stuff from asset stores.

We 3D artists need to make a living too you know.

Forget 3D for the time being, stick to 2D as you learn to make games. Adding that 3rd dimension adds a lot more complexity to making games, and, as a beginning game programmer, you don't need that complexity yet.

SFML is a good place to start, it gives you a lot of the tools you need to make a game. If you want to us SFGUI for the GUI, that's fine too. Just pick a game type you think would be fun and fairly simple, start learning SFML, and have at it. I know there are some tutorials out there for making a pong clone in SFML, so that might be a good place to start.

Good luck and have fun.

Hello both,

Sorry for the late reply. Thank you for your feedback it is much appreciated

BeerNutts: I will be sticking with 2D for now. In fact I am not even going to do game development just yet. I want to get the basic GUI side of things sorted first before I jump in. However yeah a pong clone would be my best bet firstly; so I can get to grips with drawing.

Scouting Ninja: Yes I will be working with Blender in the future, reason why I have wrote my down below paragraph concerning Python. However thanks for the heads up regarding assets, that would probably be my best bet in the future.

I have been thinking and have decided to pick Python back up using Tkinter and eventually Pygame. So far it is not bad (I am missing my curly braces).

I bought two books a while back and never really enjoyed it. However now that I am proficient in PHP I am picking it up very quickly indeed (which I can only hope is a good thing).

Also hobby aside what are the advantages will being proficient in Python in terms of career opportunity be? Of course I would love to do GUI development, working with back-end databases and networking working with the Python Standard Library. And hopefully become decent enough in Pygame.

Career opportunity aside would heading down this route improve myself as a programmer? I would be working with Python 3.x+

Thanks both.

Mike

Depends on your job market. If you are looking at getting in to CG Python is a must have skill. In all other realms it's a nice to have at best. In all honesty, scripting languages don't have a huge impact on a resume as they are expected to be pretty accessible by their nature. Unless of course you are going in as a hired gun contractor and are expected to hit the ground running.