Hello Everyone,
I'm going to start this with a bit about me. I am a relatively new programmer, and have been in the working world for the past 2 years now. My main programming language is C#. I have also dabbled in VB6 in the office, to support some of our legacy applications.
For the past 3 years I have been "mentoring" a team of students at a sixth form college in robotics, which is primarily coded in C++, also with this I have taught myself some Java, as one of the students wanted to learn it and apply it to robotics.
My question is, like many before me have asked, where should I begin to look at game developing?
My first stop on the road was to look at http://www.gamefromscratch.com/post/2011/08/04/I-want-to-be-a-game-developer.aspx which is about a year out of date, which seems to be a long time in the development circles.
A brief on the article says to avoid C++, is this a wise choice for starting out?
From that article I also started to look at XNA, however from doing a quick google it appears that Microsoft are not supporting this for windows 8, not that this is a big factor in my choices. As a MSDN holder, I have access to the full MS Development tools anyway.
My next stop would have to be Java, now I don't know if this is a misconception but I believe that it follows the same syntax and structure as C#, and seems to be widely support on the GDK side of things. Correct?
I'm going to preemptively try and answer a question I think I am going to get asked, and that is "What type of game do you want to make?"
In the long run my aim is to put together a RPG type game, with a few possible starting "Classes", walk around some open spaces, go into some dungeons, kill some bosses, win some loot, save a princess. You know that sort of thing.
I am well aware, that this is a long time goal, and I guess my first attempt would be something along the lines of "snake" or a simple "old school" game.
Thanks for reading this and any help would be much appreciated.
Ben