So you could see if you can learn to program before investing money into hardware.

Where's a good place to start with programming

Juliean said:

JoeJ said:
There isn't.

Well, if we are being pedantic (which I occasionally feel like 😉 ), there is a difference in what level of hardware is useful to you.

A high-end gaming PC mostly requires the beefiest GPU you can find (depending on your choice of game), alongside a sufficient amount of RAM (16GB was still plenty enough some time ago, more then 32GB should never be necessary), and a CPU that doesn't make you CPU-bound. An SSD also helps with load-times and streaming of assets.

For development, depending on what you do, you can use a way higher CPU, more RAM, and an even faster disk. Compiling a large C++-project can take a long time, so even a workstation threadripper-beast of a CPU would still be an upgrade (which would be slower for gaming than a regular mid/high-end consumer CPU). You can easily use 64GB of RAM, when an engine + visual studio + a graphic-program is open. And an NVME can further reduce the, sometimes riddiculous, load time of the commercial engines.

Now I'm not talking about minimal requirements, but about hardware that will boost your producitivity. Anectdotaly, I have a relatIvely new PC at work, but a few years and price-classes below my home-PC. The difference in “time having to wait for the engine or compiler” is noticably different. Whether it will matter for your project is a different topic, and I'd be willing to admit that for someone who has to ask this question, like OP, it probably won't. But compared to a gaming machine, whose aim it is to match the monitors frame-rate w/o any noticable frame-drops, that limit for a development machine is much higher.

Thanks

Depending how much money you have you can buy a PC with “strong” 3D (GPU and many CPU-cores). Or you buy a relatively cheap PC without powerful 3D and with only a few CPU cores.

As a beginner programming language I recommend Python (but you will hear other people recommending other programming languages).

Edit: Do you already have an idea what kind of game you want to develop? Card game? Racing game? And so on… There are many, many genres (categories) of games. And they have different hardware “hunger”. For example an ego-shooter needs powerful 3D. A strategy game can be programmed without 3D or with 3D.

Seamus_Arian said:
Where's a good place to start with programming

I do it for too long to know, but go here: https://www.tutorialspoint.com/codingground.htm​

Change ‘World’ to your name, and click ‘Execute’.
The program runs, and you can read the output an the right side.
You just wrote your first C program. (well, almost)

The site also has tutorials for most popular languages. You can start learning right there, without a computer yet.

To do it on your own computer instead online, you need to install an IDE (code edtior, compiler, project management).
That's a bit of a burden. So i do even recommend the online way at first, because you can focus just on programming, to figure out if you like it. It's not for everybody.

The choice of language is a question nobody can answer for you.
Almost all modern languages are based on C. C is simple, gives maximum performance, and is designed to closely match how computers work.
I would get started with that, but later consider other more modern languages with much more features, making many things much easier.

But everybody will give different recommendations.

For your own hobby development you won't be taxing the machine. Especially not be as hard as the hundred-million-dollar professional games.

Any reasonably modern computer can do the job. If you went to Best Buy or other big stores and bought any of their gaming machines it would be more than enough. It might have a markup for their support and not be the most cutting edge, but that's fine because you don't have the budget or experience to develop them.

Edit: Do you already have an idea what kind of game you want to develop? Card game? Racing game? And so on… There are many, many genres (categories) of games. And they have different hardware “hunger”. For example an ego-shooter needs powerful 3D. A strategy game can be programmed without 3D or with 3D.

I haven't quite decided though I lean toward and rpg, platformer, or strategy.

So C is a sort of foundational language? Learn that language and it'll help you branch into others.

Is best buy the best choice for computers or is there a superior store?

• double post! Sorry!

RPGs, platformers and strategy games can be quite cool in 2D. That can save you money.

I can recommend tutorialspoint, too. You can there have a look at different programming languages. After that you know a bit about which languages fits to you. You also will learn whether programming is the right thing for you.

And I want to mention “No-code” tools for development. If I remember correctly there (among many others) GDevelop and Kodu.