+- The VG Resource (https://www.vg-resource.com)
+-- Forum: Archive (https://www.vg-resource.com/forum-65.html)
+--- Forum: July 2014 Archive (https://www.vg-resource.com/forum-139.html)
+---- Forum: Creative Zone (https://www.vg-resource.com/forum-86.html)
+----- Forum: Games Development (https://www.vg-resource.com/forum-22.html)
+----- Thread: What does it take? (/thread-24770.html)
Pages:
1
2
RE: What does it take? - 8buttons - 04-29-2014
Hi FinalSmash,
You have a lot of options and I'll give you a little more. I won't say use this <insert_something_here> because of your age. I had nailed my first few programming languages when I was 14 and now at 34 I often find it more difficult to absorb some information than I did in my younger days. You have an advantage being young, you aren't 'stuck in your ways' yet.
A few very important points have been made here, the one than stands out for me was by TheShyGuy and he said you have to learn how to learn. This may sound a bit silly but its not! It's incredibly important! Never expect to get everything right first time around, more often than not you will learn more from your failures than you will from successes. There is profound learning that happens when you get something wrong, that is when your brain starts joining the dots together and forms solutions.
It can be difficult knowing where to start with something like creating a game. It's actually why I'm here, to get some advice from others who have more experience in 'game creation' than I have, I was an application programmer (just FYI). As you no doubt know by now there are many programming languages out there and each is suited to different things. At first it can seem like a bit of a pain just getting set up, getting the tools to allow to start the process so I'll try to help you out on that.
I would suggest starting with a package called Visual Studio. It's a development environment (programming tools) made by Microsoft. They have a free version that you can download to get you running called Visual Studio Express. The package has Visual Basic (which you can use with DirectX) if you want to start with that but it also come C# (pronouced 'see sharp'). C# is a language that can be used to create games for Windows and the XBox 360. You can download it from ...
http://www.visualstudio.com/downloads/download-visual-studio-vs#DownloadFamilies_4
From that page download the Visual Studio Express 2010 All-in-One package. That contains almost everything you will need to get started. Microsoft do have a newer version of Visual Studio but stick to the 2010 version, there are reasons but I won't go into that right now. You will also need a package called XNA Game Studio, it is a kind of addon package to Visual Studio that gives you the extra bits needed for making a game. You can download XNA Game studio from ...
http://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/download/details.aspx?id=23714
So the things you want are Visual Studio 2010 and XNA Game Studio 4.0. From there it's time to start some serious learning and to make some games!
One of the reasons I've chose to recommend VS and XNA is the amount of step-by-step tutorials out there. Get on to google and start searching for XNA tutorials. Once you have found some tutorials, follow them and you can see a game running (or at least chunks of a game) in under an hour starting from code. Be warned, when you first start up Visual Studio it looks like there is a lot there and quite simply, there is! It's a very large application but you don't need all of it to get started. Just follow the tutorials, they will keep you right.
The last thing I'll say try to look past what the tutorials show you. What I mean by that is, lets say a tutorial shows you how to make a small picture appear on the screen, well thats not really impressive but think what you could do with that, the potential. Once you can do that, you could animate it, change the picture to a really cool picture, add some sounds, make some more pictures and all of a sudden you have a character running around the screen shooting the crap out of some bad guys.
Good luck, I hope some of that helps and I hope to be playing some of YOUR games in a couple of years!