Hello everyone,
I just recently joined this amazing community!
So I have been programming games for the past 2 years or so. I am still learning, learning and learning new things everyday!
So my question is what should I focus on now? I have established a solid base in game programming. I have worked with the Unreal engine and built my own game with it. I am pretty good with Unity. Already have 7-8 prototypes established. I am currently delving deep into c++, working with libraries like glfw, SDL and making some games. I am a Masters student and current taking electives in data structures and algorithms. I am also working on a big web game project using javascript, jquery etc
After all this I still feel that there is so much to learn in terms of game development. I am still just a beginner in opengl graphics. I have no clue how network multiplayer games work. But eventually I think I will get there.
So now you have an idea about my background a bit. Coming back to the point of this topic. Last month my college sponsored us to visit several game development firms in the west coast of US. We visited big companies like Riot games, Blizzard, Treyarch, Sony, Naughty Dog, Insomniac games, Zynga to name a few. After talking to the big shots from the industry it was clear that c++ is a must know. I asked one of the senior game developer at Blizzard as to how should one improve his/her c++ programming skills? He replied saying dig into open source libraries, read code from existing open source games, try creating your own mods. Try creating your own level editor. He gave quake3 source code as an example to follow. Then I asked one other senior developers from Naughty Dog. He said the same thing but he also said that the quake3 source code is old, very very old. He is pretty sure that the existing c++ standards in AAA companies are way different from the code that was written few years back. Back in those days, everything was single threaded. Games today run on multi threads. So referring to the old code base does not make much sense. So I asked him what should be a good resource or reference to a modern open source library that uses modern c++ code but he wasn't sure about that.
So my question is where and how do I gain super good c++ skills, what are the good open source codes out there that I can refer to? Where do I exactly start looking to slowly move on to make my own simple mods.