Beginning Game Development: A Refreshers Approach (Pt. 1 of 42)

Beginning Game Development: a refreshers approach (pt 1 of 42)

Greetings out there Destructoid Nation!

First I want to say, it is I, your friendly neighborhood tehArtist. I only changed my nick to match my GamerTag, considering that’s what most of you know me by now anyway from FNF.

With my new name, I’m starting a new adventure…

For years I have wanted to get truly in depth with Game Development (it was my focus in CS ya know), however, with lack of time, and my inability to resist shiny objects I have found myself away from the keyboard coding on a regular basis for nearly a year now. Other than playing with some C++ physics libs from time to time, I have let a lot of that basic and common programming knowledge leak out my ears in the many hours I’ve spent shooting you nubs in haloz and modern warfarez over the past few months.

However, it’s a new year, and with a new year, comes new responsibilities and resolutions that nobody ever really keeps. I made a resolution this year, and I plan to stick with it. I’m updating my skills and starting over all the way back at the beginning. It’s time for a brief refresher in all of that good ole fashioned coding and good practices.

After debating for several days which language would be most beneficial for me to restart my journey in I finally came to the conclusion that with tools like XNA out there, and the future hope of being able to share that on XBL and Windows Live C# would be the best way to go. This created a large problem; I don’t know the first damn thing about C#. I’ve played with it a few times in some of my programming courses, but always focused on C++. So I was off to Amazon.com to find a good book on C# 2008.

After hours of searching the many reviews on Amazon and realizing that my absence from programming had led me to miss .net 3.0 almost entirely (we are currently at 3.5) I needed a hardcore refresher. I don’t know about the rest of you, but when choosing a new reference for my library, I’m very picky, and like to spend my money wisely. I tend to bank a lot on the reviews of others, and read their reviews for other books, and possibly books that I have already read. I enjoy a good programming book that cuts out all the bullshit and gets straight to the point. Bullshit is like those shiny objects, very distracting, and it takes away from what’s actually being explained. None the less, I finally found what looks to be a promising start Head First C# (Brain-Friendly Guides) [ILLUSTRATED] (Paperback). When I receive the book, I’ll write a short little review on the first chapter to give you guys a preview of what the book itself and the example code is like. I just hope this book doesn’t turn out to be shallow.

I have also received a copy of Maya 2008 from a friend that work at the college (yay for mass licenses) I used to attend, I plan to just use my old Maya 7 Unlimited Foundation book to refresh myself in using Maya. As for XNA, I don’t know yet, the documentation and retail text available for XNA is rather limited. There is absolutely nothing on XNA 2.0 yet, at least not until the end of January, so I’m holding off on purchasing an XNA book.

I’m sure you are sitting there thinking, ‘Why the hell do I care you are a lazy noob and have to start all over because you didn’t keep in practice?’. My point in this is, I hope to motivate a few of you to join me on this endeavor; I plan to actually develop a fully functioning game in the end featuring the great people at Destructoid as characters (or at least reference them in the design). I even want to share some of the stuff I pick up and learn along the way with the rest of you. It would be nice to turn this into a weekly or bi-weekly blog. Ok, that’s enough of that, I’m a black screen and Game Over Text away from sounding like a Devry Commercial UGH!

As always Dtoid Nation…

Have a great day,

And Happy Gaming!

P.S…What do you think of the new Cblog Banner?

(Notice: For those of you whom already consider yourselves experts in this matter, I know before you state it, much more knowledge is required, such as the multiple scripting languages, DirextX or OpenGL, ect.. I will discuss those in later blogs. Foundation and Principles are key, so that’s where I am starting.)