I am code programmer also and when I first started going to school and learning about game programming it was all a great big headache me for too. I then later learned that most videogames are artwork in detail and then require resources from a artist perspective. So, that didn't work for me.

I like programming so I am looking for game servers as an entry path for my career to start, rather than videogame development.

I suggest that you download GoDot, Unreal, and Unity engines to experience then environment in them and get a feel for where programming is implemented into that type of software.

artdog said:
if i only know lua, …

Wikipedia has a list of engines, and notes what languages they support--including Lua. I can't speak for how accurate the list might be, or whether any of the listed engines are any good, but it might provide a starting-point at least.

See the list at the following link:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_game_engines

Learning how to make video games is an uphill struggle mate and is going to take you a while.

This is my personal experience and hopefully it might give you some positive vibes ?.

I've been tasked to convert a commercial console game written in C to port it to C# and OpenGL, the beginning was extremely painful, for weeks there were 10s of 1000s of errors and the thing wouldn't obviously compile.

Eventually, I got it to solve the last error to finally get a successful build; that was only the beginning as nothing would yet render, but at some point, I finally got something on the screen and my motivation was instantly boosted.

Two advices from my personal experience:

• give yourself goals for tangible results, e.g. work onto parts which you can immediately experience gain on screen, it's motivating because you see that you are actually making progress
  (as opposed to work for weeks on some technical stuff that in the end don't bring that many changes on screen, that is of course important but mentally depressing and exhausting)
• take breaks, don't work on it everyday, this is a terrible mistake I did and now sometimes I take a break off of it and do something completely different, it's important for your mind
  also, read code you written on your commits, you'll then realize that you've come a long way, the battle is not over but you've already dodged many silver bullets, just stay confident

Also, be realistic with yourself, it takes a lot of time to write code; once you've accepted that fact, you will gain in confidence. ?

Aybe One said:
I've been tasked to convert a commercial console game written in C to port it to C# and OpenGL

c# with opengl is not a good combo. why they forced that scriptlanguage at you? they should kept c.

One last thing I would like to add to my previous experience is,

If you are experiencing any kind of technical issues that are slowing you down in the round-trip coding/testing; take a good week to fix them once and for all so that the pleasure of coding remains.

In my case, once I got that +70K LOC of converted C code, it was extremely unpractical, huge monolithic classes very hard to navigate, code analysis was down to its knees and compilation was ridiculously long even for tiny changes.

I refactored that onto multiple classes and libraries so that both compilation and code analysis came back to be an acceptable execution time, it's more boring than it is difficult to achieve; however, the outcome is extremely valuable: programming comfort.

That said, good luck and don't give hope, as they say, failure is success in progress.?

@Geri

The thing is when it comes to refactoring, C# + ReSharper is an incredible combo, unless I'm mistaken it's unmatched.

Did years of Unity but then realized that bare-metal OpenGL has also very good positive sides, okay there's no “scene view” but you have full control and for instance, edit and continue which is simply amazing.

But that's a long debate and not everyone might agree depending its views and background.

@Geri

Forgot to mention but, among other things for instance, in C# the debugger is way more rich, when it's C, sometimes you only see pointers and cannot browse arrays in Visual Studio.

Additionally, while debugging you can introduce new classes and directly use them with edit and continue, no need to recompile, just continue.
Not something you can commonly do with C and C++ AFAICT, these handy things are invaluable for me because the round-trip is much faster.

Aybe One said:
Forgot to mention but, among other things for instance, in C# the debugger is way more rich, when it's C, sometimes you only see pointers and cannot browse arrays in Visual Studio.

Side note: This is not entirely correct statement - especially with updates to Visual Studio during the last year. You can now expand C pointers into arrays. Previously you either had to use an extension, or view elements directly (but not as an array - you had to hand set index).

Aybe One said:
these handy things are invaluable for me

Ok, but wouldnt it been easyer to keep the original c code, and just convert the renderer to opengl? Sounds like 99% less effort to me. As reading your post, it sounds like they just wanted to release it for another platform.