The Frist Step

To become a game programmer, one must first learn to program.

I am not sure exactly when I started programing. My first projects were typing pre-written basic programs from this yellow book of "Computer Games in BASIC." I was fairly young at that time and I could understand the structure and read the code, but I was not really developing it. My first formal programing education was learning Pascal in the summer before my freshman year at high school. Concepts such as flow control, variables, and even recursion were fairly straight forward for me. In college I learned FORTRAN and C.

But even knowing already four different programming languages, I still never considered myself a programmer. I was an Engineer and used them as tools to get my own projects done. I never thought about developing software for others to use.

Now the interesting thing is that after about 30 years of "Not being a programmer." I realized that I have a decent amount base knowledge. So after talking with one of my software developer friends, I have decided to start the project with bringing myself up to speed C++. After a few google searches on "Game Programing and C++" I found Lazy Foo' Productions. A quick download of Microsoft Visual C++ Express 2010 and away I went.

Right now I have just finished with Lesson 19. So far this has been good for me to relearn C++ as well as start understanding some of the basics of game programing. One of the things I have been doing is rewriting some of the code to my personal style and sense of re-usability. I expect to be done with his lessons some time next week. Then after that I should be developing my first game. I am thinking of doing a "Connect Four" game first, maybe "Battleship" after that. The nice thing about my "misspent youth" is that I have quite a few games that I can recreate myself as a starting point.