Seriously, he deserves to be answered properly! I personally am lucky enough to be currently doing a computer science degree at University, so I have lots of tools and reference materials available to me. What I would seriously recommend for you is to read ALL OF the beginners section. All of your questions are answered there, and there''s a list of books and tools that will be useful to you.
Some things to bear in mind though...
1) You''re going to need some serious patience. Game programming is not necessarily more complicated than regular programming, as in it all has to do with logic, but some of the APIs (like Windows, DirectX and OpenGL) are pretty complex, and can be hard to get into. If you stick with it, one day it''ll click
2) Don''t think you''ll be writing Quake 7 as your first program. Aim for something small like Breakout or Tetris to get you used to drawing things, sound, input and game logic, then expand a little.
3) You will need to constantly read around for updates to technology, good solutions to common problems, etc etc etc. It takes motivation to keep going, so if you are likely to drop it after a week, save yourself the week and don''t start.
Anywho, good luck with it - it''s pretty damn cool when you finally get something working and your friends can play it, even if it''s juat Pong
RM.
