I have read through several post and guides on game development and have gather so much information that it feels like asking for a drop of water and finding a hail storm.

As this is my first time wanting to give it a go, after 3 years working in QA (no knowledge of coding was needed when I started), I wish to start with something really basic. Qix (Taito, 1981) is an old time favourite of mine and in my opinion, very basic. I understand that coding language has progressed over the years and that there are plenty game engines out there. But the real question is: where do I start, to learn something, as basic as Qix? What language should I start with or is there an engine that can help out to make me understand the true basics?

I have GameMaker, Unity, Godot Engine 2.1, Stencyl and Unreal 4 installed and I am willing to put the hours in to learn what is needed.

I hope my question is formulated in the correct way,

Regards.

Oddly, Qix is actually quite an awkward game to implement with modern technologies, because it seems to rely on being able to read graphical data for gameplay purposes, whereas modern technology tends to have a 'fire and forget' approach to rendering where you're not expected to read what you rendered. So you'd have to do some sort of primitive software rendering, but it also seems to have some vector graphic requirements (for the enemy Qix) which are awkward to draw manually. So... are you determined to do Qix?

What I might do for this is:

• choose SFML as the multimedia library with C++ as the development language
• understand that I would probably need to maintain 2 copies of the screen - one for rendering, and one for game logic, and update them in parallel where necessary
• work out how I'd move the player, in response to input
• look into 'flood fills' to fill in areas that the player captures
• find line drawing algorithms to be able to draw the Qix

You don't need Unity, Unreal, and Godot - they're 3 broadly equivalent pieces of tech, so if you want to use a proper engine, just pick one. And they will all be too distracting for a task like this.

@Kylotan,

Thank you for your answer. I just considered Qix as it looks extremely simple when you play it.

When I say simple, I just mean something really basic to get the basics of coding, to learn a language at the same time. Usually I run before I walk but in this case, I am actually going to crawl first. At my current workplace, the dev team (commercial stuff) advised to start with Python and go from there...

Python's a reasonable choice as a first coding language. Python plus PyGame is one good option. Sadly Pygame is poorly maintained and a lot of the tutorials on their site are out of date or even entirely dead links. But if you can find a tutorial, work through one and get the hang of the edit/run process, before starting on your own game.

A games that is simpler than Qix is Pong, so if you want to crawl, start there. Transforming that into Breakout is a nice second step.

@Kylotan

Thank you very much for the advice and help :)