Before I ask my questions, I should give some info on my background.

• I'm a Senior in High School
• I'm in AP Computer Science A (Java based)
• I take Digital Interactive Media, which gave me extensive experience with Photoshop and editing programs

So, I want to make games. But how? Like what would be some pointers to push me in the right direction? Is Java beneficial to the industry?

I really have no prior experience other than making a couple tutorial games with game maker back in 6th grade, haha.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!!!

Java is fine for a beginner and in lots of cases a good idea if you are a beginner. For making games, I would start with the basics, pong, breakout, space invaders, ect. If you jump right into a big game without learning the basics then you most likely will not finish. As for making games, you can use different libraries such as slick, which I have used and it works great, but I am not sure if it is still being supported. There is an sfml bind to java, but I have not used it. You can make a game using straight java if you want. Also, when you do finish a game, I recommend getting some people to look it over and see if you are in the right direction.

Start at drawing something to the screen.. you can figure out how to do that using Java and opengl (JOGL). After you have that basic picture getting drawn to the screen start moving it around and playing with that - try having different pictures at the same time - try making them move and bounce off of each other.

Once you get all that stuff figured out - then make a plan for a basic game keeping in mind the things it took to get stuff on to the screen. Like crusable said, we are talking games like breakout and space invaders - these you can also easily make your own art.

Good luck!

My experiencie

FORGET TO DESIGN VIDEOGAMES.

Just start working in the IT world programming in J2EE, it means a lot of money, less work and more reputation and career.

Then later you can start any videogame project for fun. Or you could start a project while you are working.

IMHO, i was shocked to know that some half baked programmers earned the double than my salary of indie game developer, working trivial business projects (in fact, most business projects are database, logic,web and security. Rinse and repeat thousand of times).

Do you work on those "trivial" business projects? I work in that field and I can tell you that it is far from trivial. I started off developing games and I can tell you that one is not easier than the other, they are just different. There are different focuses and concerns between games and business apps, but I have written games that require databases, or business apps with lots of graphics rendering. I don't think this is a true statement given my own personal experience. Besides if the OP is here to make games, then they shouldn't be discouraged.

If the OP wants to make games in Java then that is cool. There is http://code.google.com/p/libgdx/ and http://slick.ninjacave.com/ with more listed at http://www.java-gaming.org/index.php?action=resources