I have been messing around with some game programming but I always hit a brickwall. I think at this point the code makes sense but maybe I am confused on what I should actually be coding. Anyone know of any good books for the concepts behind making a game in general like threading, triple and double buffering, collision detection, UI, GUI, etc....

I've written a few visual basic that do different arthimitic, takes input of values and gives you costs or how much yardage you would need, a java program that has a cyan background and a smily face that moves around. I am currently working on making its magenta background transparent or masked. I've made some karel the robot programs that have it moving around in different points and spelling out my name by going in one side of the letter and out the other side. You could put the letters in any order and it would still spell put the letters on screen in the order you wanted them to. I made a program with C++ and opengl that displays a 3d box on screen that rotates at a 45 degree angle at a rotation speed of 10ms. I've made a bunch of simple little programs, but I am trying to move further. I did a C# program of a number guessing game, but it had no advanced functions or anything.

Thats one reason I was thinking that if I learned some more detail on these subjects it might help because then I could that the 3d box and make it bounce around and do collision detection of the walls or maybe another box. I could also take double buffering so I could have the background moving so that it looked like the box was flying as it rotated.

Another thing I wanted to see if anyone knew of was there a book or website with "problems" of things to program going from easy to really hard. Maybe that way I can increase my programs farther by just running through them all and seeing if maybe I learned anything new from them.

As much as it is repeated I'd highly recommend the concept of moving in "steps" in terms of program size. Try copying games like Pong, Tetris, Mario(difficulty ->) etc. Most people don't opt to do it as they think they're too "simple" or "boring" or somesuch, but in reality there are HUGE similarities between even a 3d RPG and a console game, designing the underlying systems is really the "hard" part of game development, after that it's just down to adding specific features.

If you get good at designing the underlying systems then you already have a good foothold for moving into new concepts. It doesn't really help to get a 3d box bouncing around a screen if you figure out an hour later you need to recode the entire game loop because you've locked yourself out of any decent way to pass information around.

The 3d box wasn't a game loop or anything, it was just a program that showed a rotating box and that was all it was suppose to do. I was thinking of adding features to it to learn further steps.

Currently I wanted to make a pac man clone so I could try to help reinforce things and learn things I need to for programming games.

If you are willing to use java to learn I myself have just discovered some very useful videos on Youtube showing you how to get started. It gives you the basics and then from there puts that together in a game of pong. After that there are more advanced tutorials. If you have even a decent understanding of the language it shouldn't be too hard to follow. Here's a link to the channel. http://www.youtube.com/user/TheJavaHub?ob=0&feature=results_main look at the section for Beginner Java Game Programming. Hope this help. Good luck