Hi!

I'm a French Canadian and I'm hoping to someday create games of any kinds, namely starting with short projects I could look back to in the future.

I never programmed in my life before, that is until just 15 days ago when I followed a C# tutorial on Udemy. It gave me an epihany to finally take it up, mainly for how I really loved it. I hear it's a good starting language and I hope to improve my mindset by coding a lot.

I used to spend a lot of time making short games on RPG Maker 2000 as a teen. Taking up coding made me realize that I should have learned that earlier in my lifetime since I feel like I would have enjoyed it as much for how logic and puzzle-solving aspects are involved.

So far I got myself Monogame framework (since XNA is now decommissioned) and I'm sort of having a difficult time learning where to start since I can hardly find complete guides of it. My question as a newcomer to this community is about the first programming language I'm learning: is C# a good starting language if I want to delve more into game development?

I will appreciate help~

Well first, congrats and welcome to the fun and frustrating world of programming.

As for Monogame ... 1 reason you won't find many guides, is that the community didn't bother to repease hardly anything that was already documented for XNA since it is a (mostly) compatible implementation of XNA. So for monogame you will you have to run 2 google searches for things you need to find ... 1 for monogame and 1 for XNA ...

Yes C# is a GREAT language. For learning to program, for game programming, and for normal professional programming. Some other langauges are good at each of those too, but C# is a good place to start (or finish).

I recommend you install both an IDE (like visual studio 2015 community edition) and ALSO a pure text editor (like notepad++ or sublime). And also get these tools (and more): kdiff3, git, tortoisegit, paint.net. And of course monogame.

Also, you may find (older) tutorials on SDL to be useful while learning too. I'm not saying its better than monogame ... but that it was a pretty popular from like 2005 to 2012 (at least) ... so there is a pretty decent sized community around it, with lots of open source projects and tutorials.

Also, if you have a wired xbox 360 controller, it works perfectly out of the box with XNA and monogame ... which can be really fun for playing the super simple tutorial style games you'll be starting with, instead of just keyboard.

If you want to see my really incomplete submission for the week of awesome 2 (a 1 week game dev competition) you can download it here:

http://www.gamedev.net/blog/1941-xais-awesome-living-toys/

And later this month I'll upload the code for it, so you can see someone elses starting point for a small XNA project.

It has basic working sound, background, sprites, controller movement, collision detection and "logic" (meaning a few super simple functions that determine how the computer acts).

I'll post a link on this thread once I upload it (it'll be a week or so I think).

Thanks, I'll look into those. My focus is to first learn how to master creating 2D games on Windows PC or Android before attempting 3D projects, to better grasp the idea of how coding works.