Okay I see myself as a great puzzle solver and love doingit, its one of the reasons I am, (and have been) studying C++ for a while now. Sobasically im looking for a helping hand on where to go to find material (books,videos, websites, tutorials etc.) that focus in on the algorithms and logicbehind tranlsating a complex idea, or blueprint into optimised and creativecode.

I feel I know the language, but in order to start thinking up andprogramming my own ideas I need to learn about how to build project from theground up, and use the tools of the OOP to do complex and clever things thatcould never be thought up by a beginner. I want to be creative and right nowknowing the language is not enough. Whether its Logic, Arithmatic, or simplePuzzle solving, I would just love to get as much insight as possible.

I love video tutorials so youtube will continue to be scoured, and there are also lots of C# XNA game tutorials on 3Dbuzz.com,(currently going through their simple C++ ASCII game right now). So to ask asecond question, would these be applicable even though im focusing on C++? are therules of the C# OOP similar enough for the algorithms and practices they use inthat language to be a big help for me in mine?

Honeslty the best place to start is to start programming and make the mistake of not planning it out. I say this for one reason. No tutorial in the world will allow you to fail. The point of a tutorial is to teach you how to do something that someone has already thought of.

Follow my logic here for a second,

When you are just starting out, you know the language and you want to make something cool but you have no idea where to start. So start out with something simple and learn from there on what it takes for you to do it. You are going to have to make a mistake on bad code to learn what to plan for in the future. That way when your ready to actually set out on an idea you dont just immediatly hit the google machine and ask how do I make this game? Now its completely understandable if your trying to research how to incorperate pyshics or shaders etc to your engine and your running into problems. But I dont think looking up gaming templates and how to start an adventure game from scratch would be very educational. Mainly because when you get to the end and they haven't finished writing the tutorial... what then?

I say start like this, draw something to the canvas. Make a shape, make a background, load an image, just put something on screen. Now make a box and limit its movement to inside that box. Now allow that circle to jump when pushing space. Now make objects randomly spawn in that area and the ball has to avoid it, while the bounding box rotates and music plays. Now make it start flashing random colors while things shoot in rand locations and everything pulses to the beat of the music. Now add a score mechinism.

There you go, you just made your first game, and you learned how to seperate functions, objects, scripts, and how things should be incorperated because you had to go back and edit code multiple times. Now the next time you make a project, you will start to add elements on a game design doc and write out what you need, how they interact and figure whats needed before you start authoring your code.

<3 Mayple