Hey people. How's it goin? I'm currently a High Schooler and I have been taking programming for about a year now in my school. I'm currently in my second year. I've always been interested in game programming so I decided to join up here to get started. I have made a tic tac toe game using C++. I have also made a "Hero" game, where you are a little x and you have to get off an island that is surrounded by randomly placed "alligators" (> and <) by using "bridges" (= sign). There is also a ? somewhere on the map that can either : 1) Kill you 2) Gives you a gun to kill the alligators with 3) Give you a Helicopter 4) Extra bridge 5) Food (can be poisonous) The hero game also has an auto mode where the hero tries to escape by himself. I used classes in making both of the games. So where do you guys think I should start?

Hey herb,

Welcome to GDNet! [smile] Firstly, have you taken a look at the information provided here? It might answer a few of the questions you may have.

As for actual games to make, it depends what direction you'd like to take. Some ideas include Pong, Breakout, Tetris and Pacman (roughly in this order, too). Each one represents a different challenge and differing problems. The question that springs to my mind is whether you'd like to stick with console development or move on to using a graphics API?

As you've already made a few games, I see no reason why you couldn't move on to learning a graphics API and making any of the games above. They'd all give you a significant goal to work towards without being overly complex.

If you could show the code for the "Hero" game, I'd be happy to make suggestions for things to improve. Once it's in good shape, you can try to make it work with a real graphics API (I assume you're just writing to the console right now?) and make it playable in real-time. At that point you'll have the skill set to start working on more complex things - the sky's the limit, really (but getting there is a lot harder than just jumping) :)