Opinion On Where To Go Now

[Nunez]

I've just finished my first semester in college and my first college class for computer programming. I've programmed a little bit before during High School, but never any actual classes. We went over the basics and fundamentals of C. I have a pretty good understanding of pointers, functions, arrays, and just the fundamentals I guess. I'll be taking a class over C++ next semester, but I was wondering what everyone thought might be a good place to start learning some game programming concepts with the knowledge I have right now. I'm very interested in programming for the Caanoo, whether that be emulation, simple games, or anything... Any comments would be much appreciated, thanks in advance.

Below I attached our final project in class, so maybe you can see my level of skill.

 

[u9i]

It is difficult to tell from such a small program. But i think, if you know the fundamentals, branching, loops, functions and even pointers, you should just go for it. Start with something simple though, if you want to make a game, make the simplest game possible to get you familiar with the basics in a game, like moving game elements around, collisions, sound effects, start menu and just different scenes in the game in general.

Btw, if you have a Caanoo already, please tell me if it is connected to the internet.
Good luck
/Uni

 

[SolarLune]

Yep; like U9i said, get a quick game up and running. If you want to use SDL, then C++ should work fine, but if you want to use another language, like BennuGD or Love, then you'll have to opt in for other languages. Since you know C++ well enough, run through some C++ tutorials and get them up and running. Adapting them to Caanoo shouldn't be difficult at all.

 

[Nunez]

What I've mainly been confused about is how to implement C++ with something like SDL. I have no clue how that even works. Is there any tutorials that you could refer me to that would pretty well explain that and getting it to run on the Caanoo?

 

[SolarLune]

Get the latest GPH SDK - there are a few threads around here about setting it up to compile on your Caanoo; you should be able to download it from the Caanoo's file archive. When you run the wizard to make a new project in CodeBlocks, it will create a template project that uses SDL to load and display an image. From there, read up on tutorials like Lazy Foo's there to learn about SDL.

 

[Nunez]

Ok, thanks a million. I'm gonna try to start this soon, and I'll ask around if I need some more help, but thanks alot. I'm super excited to get on track with starting.