So were do I begin? I know c++ well and made lots of programs with it but now I just want to know were do I start making games? I'm confused on what I need to use and have questions.

How do you make your game engine?

Can you just use c++ and no other addition?

Do you have to use other peoples game engines?

Were can I find a tutorial on how I can start making my games?

Thank you

1) So were do I begin? I know c++ well and made lots of programs with it but now I just want to know were do I start making games?
2) How do you make your game engine?
3) Can you just use c++ and no other addition?
4) Do you have to use other peoples game engines?
5) Were can I find a tutorial on how I can start making my games?

1. Generally start simple. Text based games are great if you have not built any games before. Text is nice because you don't need to spend your days worrying about pushing pixels. Beginners tend to start with "guess the number". The classic "Tic Tac Toe" is frequently used to teach the basics of AI; you can build stupid games or you can build an AI solution that solves the game. Text based adventure games and dungeons can reach high levels of complexity, and the multiplayer text based worlds, such as "MUD" and "MUSH" servers, have been the textual equivalent of today's MMORPGs. When you are ready to go to graphics, start with a Pong clone. Don't skip it. The task of having three independently controlled smoothly animated elements is surprisingly difficult for many beginners. When you've got that figured out, advancing your pong game to a breakout/arkanoid style game is common. This will teach more about animation, more about graphics, more about sound, about maps and data storage and game flow and menus and every other topic you need. The graphics can still be simple, just text and boxes and spheres, no need for a small army of artist and animators.

2) Good game engines are typically made by taking an existing game, ripping out the game-specific parts, and making a second game. Then when that game is over, ripping out the game specific parts and making a third game. After the second or third iteration you will have a large collection of reusable code along with a pattern for what needs to be created for new games. If you follow the pong clone example above, you might start with a game of pong. Then you'll rip out some pong-specific stuff and turn it into breakout. You'll add maps and better sound and scoring stuff. Breakout is just the bouncing ball and the blocks with no power-ups and no bonuses. Then you'll take out some breakout-only features and add some arkanoid features like paddle-guns and growing/shrinking paddles and multi-ball and so on. When you reach this point you will likely have developed your own bouncing ball game engine.

3) You can use any language you want. C++ is widely used in the industry because of how the language is aligned with systems-level work. The big game engines do seriously huge amounts of work. Back in the real business world I've been on projects where a server is considered "busy" when it handles thirty or fourty data requests per second, effectively processing about 4 megabytes per second. In many high performance games the code must process hundreds of thousands of elements per second, sometimes millions of elements per second. While you can use any language you want to implement a pong clone, when it comes to high performance computing your language choices are limted.

4) You can use other people's engines. Game studios use existing products all the time. They will use audio libraries, graphics libraries, networking libraries, and anything else that lets them get the job done cheaper and faster. Game engines like Unity and Unreal are useful to build products quickly. In the past, teams I've been on used Unity to create a huge number of prototypes within a month, to quickly iterate on design, and to publish major games. You will use different skills if your code is limited to within an engine.

5) You can find articles and tutorials right here on the site. They range in topics from beginner-level such as how data structures work, intermediate levels like state machines in games, tools for debugging, and more advanced and specialized topics like how to implement spherical harmonics in lighting, optimizations for specific problems, and parallel computing tutorials, to name a few. If you cannot find what you need, of course Google can likely find what you are looking to learn.