Hey everyone, I guess I'll start off mentioning that I am new here, and hope that my experience here will be 'enlightening'.

I've been teaching myself C# and now have a few months experience in using XNA and I'm hoping to step away from XNA now. Now I'm looking for some worthwhile, and preferably free, learning resources for some beginner/advanced begginer to professional programming.

Things that I'm really interested in learning would be 3D game engine and AI development.

Any and all feedback is appreciated.

No offense meant, but you should google for a few tutorials for XNA development. I am sure that would have taken you less time that making the post.
To get you started off however, have you considered the XNA workshop posts.http://www.gamedev.net/topic/587542-gamedevnet-xna-40-winter-workshop-in-time-for-dbp-2011/

I have Googled for some XNA tutorials and finished my work with them to do part of what I've finished so far.

I've done a few various things with XNA; Pong, Tetris, Poker, BlackJack, and 3D space shooters. Sure nothing to advanced, but not a bad start right?
I kind of wanted to step away from XNA because I feel like it's being a crutch to me. Though I guess that's just me being silly.

I guess for now I can continue working with XNA to get a little more experience under my belt, and later I'll start looking for more on the areas that I'm really interested in learning, 3D game engine and AI development. For now I guess I'll take a look into this XNA workshop, thanks for the replys

I have Googled for some XNA tutorials and finished my work with them to do part of what I've finished so far.

I've done a few various things with XNA; Pong, Tetris, Poker, BlackJack, and 3D space shooters. Sure nothing to advanced, but not a bad start right?
I kind of wanted to step away from XNA because I feel like it's being a crutch to me. Though I guess that's just me being silly.

I think the larger crutch is that you aren't challenging yourself enough with XNA. Try making a polished game that you think would compare well with other indy games; not proof of concept prototypes. Maybe not a game that could sell favorably, but one that has the same features/standards as you might find in a game being released for XBLA/Steam/PSN.

[quote name='FortifiedDestruction' timestamp='1338477407' post='4945008']
I have Googled for some XNA tutorials and finished my work with them to do part of what I've finished so far.

I've done a few various things with XNA; Pong, Tetris, Poker, BlackJack, and 3D space shooters. Sure nothing to advanced, but not a bad start right?
I kind of wanted to step away from XNA because I feel like it's being a crutch to me. Though I guess that's just me being silly.

I think the larger crutch is that you aren't challenging yourself enough with XNA. Try making a polished game that you think would compare well with other indy games; not proof of concept prototypes. Maybe not a game that could sell favorably, but one that has the same features/standards as you might find in a game being released for XBLA/Steam/PSN.
[/quote]

I agree completely. Although if you are not interested in making the game portion but rather creating editor tools for others try making something similar to the Torchlight Editor (here: http://www.runicgame...p?title=TorchED). This was written in C# and creating something similar would provide a sufficient challenge in my opinion.

Do not create the editor so only you can use it however, it must be user friendly. Anyone should be able to easily create whatever they want using your tool. Scripting can be done in C# using the built in compiler .net provides. After you have that working you could think about making your own script editor because not everyone who wants to make games will download Visual Studio. Your code editor could show syntax highlighting, provide easy compilation, as well as display basic intellisense. If an editor strays too far away from what you want to do, there are other alternatives.

I would look at the Dream.Build.Play past winners (here: https://www.dreambui...in/winners.aspx) and use those to gather ideas if you plan to go the route Way2lazy2care stated. Each of them were created in a relatively short time span and this would provide a challenge to match using XNA. As an added challenge, try to do the same project in the same amount of time as the original was done.

Can I ask what in particular you feel like it's protecting you from? There's plenty you still have to build and tweak to get a good 3D game environment running (ex: shader programming is still all on the programmer once you step away from BasicEffect), and XNA has no AI routines to speak of: those would be all you.

I've never really thought about it like that, I guess that it has been nice for learning so far so I will be sticking with XNA, I guess the big thing is I started out using XNA with no programming experience at all so I felt as though it had simplified things so much.

I think the larger crutch is that you aren't challenging yourself enough with XNA. Try making a polished game that you think would compare well with other indy games; not proof of concept prototypes. Maybe not a game that could sell favorably, but one that has the same features/standards as you might find in a game being released for XBLA/Steam/PSN.

I'm going to give this a shot the only problem with me doing it alone is I'm really not in the least artistically talented, though I know I don't have to have gorgeous graphics, but the focus would be bug free programming.

I agree completely. Although if you are not interested in making the game portion but rather creating editor tools for others try making something similar to the Torchlight Editor (here: http://www.runicgame...p?title=TorchED). This was written in C# and creating something similar would provide a sufficient challenge in my opinion.

Do not create the editor so only you can use it however, it must be user friendly. Anyone should be able to easily create whatever they want using your tool. Scripting can be done in C# using the built in compiler .net provides. After you have that working you could think about making your own script editor because not everyone who wants to make games will download Visual Studio. Your code editor could show syntax highlighting, provide easy compilation, as well as display basic intellisense. If an editor strays too far away from what you want to do, there are other alternatives.

I would look at the Dream.Build.Play past winners (here: https://www.dreambui...in/winners.aspx) and use those to gather ideas if you plan to go the route Way2lazy2care stated. Each of them were created in a relatively short time span and this would provide a challenge to match using XNA. As an added challenge, try to do the same project in the same amount of time as the original was done.

I never thought about creating editor tools before, and I think would be way out of my league at the moment.

I will of course take your other suggestion into consideration and will likely be working on something with a bit more challenge later today.