The right way to start out in game development/design [closed]
- by Marco Sacristão
Greetings everyone I'm a 19 year old student looking for some help in the field of game development.
This question may or may not seem a bit overused, but the fact is that game development has been my life long dream, and after several hours of search I've realized that I've been going in circles for the past three or four months whilst doing such research on how to really get down and dirty with game development, therefor I decided to ask you guys if you could help me out at all.
Let me start off with some information about me and things i've already learned about GameDev which might help you out on helping me out (wordplay!):
I'm not an expert programmer, but I do have knowledge on how to program in several languages including C and Java (Currently learning Java in my degree in Computer Engineering), but my methodology might not be most correct in terms of syntax (hence my difficulty in starting out, i'm afraid that the starting point might not be the most correct, and it would deploy a wrongful development methodology that would be to corrected later on, in terms of game development or other projects).
I have yet to work in a project as large as a game, never in my learning curve of programming I've done a project to the scale of a video game, only very small software (PHP Front-ends and Back-ends, with some basic JQuery and CSS knowledge).
I'm not the biggest mathematician or physicist, but I already know that is not a problem, because there are several game engines already available for use and integration with home-made projects (Box2D, etc).
I've also learned about some libraries that could be included in said projects, to ease out some process in game development, like SDL for example.
I do not know how sprites, states, particles or any specific game-related techniques work.
With that being said, you can see that I have some ideas on game development, but I have absolutely no clue on how to design and produce a game, or even how game-like mechanics work. It does not have to be a complex game just to start out, I'd rather learn the basic of game design (Like 2D drawing, tiling, object collision) and test that out in a language that I feel comfortable in which could be later on migrated to other platforms, as long that what I've learned is the correct way to do things, and not just something that I've learned from some guy on Youtube by replicating that code on the video.
I'm sorry if my question is not in the best format possible, but I've got so many questions on my mind that are still un-answered that I don't know were to start!
Thank you for reading.
