[gameprogrammer] Re: Need MAJOR help!!!
- From: Vince <uberneen@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: gameprogrammer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 10 Sep 2005 18:58:01 -0700 (PDT)
It's true that a simple project or proof-of-concept is
a good way to start. Your mario game might be a good
start, but don't think too big at first, just move a
block around, make it 'jump' and do some hit
detection, which is fairly simple in 2d.
You'll also need to consider how much of the game
engine you're going to write from scratch. There are
advantages and disadvantages to 'rolling your own',
but I find that there are a lot of GPL libraries out
there that can really help you out and they're made by
people who have conquered hurdles that may well drive
the sanest man to drink.
Look at http://www.libsdl.org and be sure to examine
the contributed libraries as well as SDL itself.
I'm personally a big advocate of cross-platform
development, so I'm going to advise that you carefully
choose what libraries you use.
Most of my learning has come from proofs of concept
which I later expand into functional additions of a
larger program. Most recently I've been playing with
a client/server roguelike which has been an excuse to
play with networking, XML config files, and some
pretty serious memory management.
I guess the most important thing that you should know
at this point is that making a complete and polished
game can be difficult and often tedious, so don't get
discouraged.
It sounds like you have already been playing with c++
and thus have a compiler, but I'll go ahead and list a
few freebies here.
http://www.bloodshed.net/devcpp.html
http://www.codeblocks.org/
Both of those do, or can use
http://www.mingw.org/
as the actual compiler.
I'm pretty fond of the devpacks system, but not all of
them work. I've never had a problem getting libraries
to work with it, you just have to fix some directories
in most cases.
I hope that helps.
Vince~
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