Hello, first post here.
Let me introduce myself, I'm a 15 years old teen who lives in Italy and has the ambition to make a game.

Now, i know that i need to use a programming language, but I'm not sure at all which one. I've had some experience with Squirrel and Pawn mainly in scripting for SA-MP and IV-MP, from which i believe i learned a lot. I developed a few complex functions and also made a small programme that would tell me the number of multiplies needed to reach a certain number with exponential growth ran by the server, but that was pretty easy.

In any case, that was about 2 years ago but now I'd like to start programming again, I've already got a few ideas for games but I simply don't know where to start. My objective is a common 3D computer game, maybe with online support, but I understand that i need to have some experience in 2D game development first.

So, some bullet points to make answering to me easier:

-What language suits my needs best?
-What do I need to make the graphics part of the game?
-Is there any good tutorial that gives info on every step of game development?

I hope this is a friendly community, I'm just a wandering soul wishing to find my path

Since you did some programming already even if it was just some scripting. I recommend you skip things like game maker and rpgmaker or similar. I think you are ready to learn a language.

You have 2 choises:

-Game oriented language
-General purpose language

If you choose first you can easily dive in game development. They are usually easy to learn and to use. Also they have everything you need to make simple/comlex games. But they do lack in performance and some advanced tehniques such as good 3d graphics,portability,third party libraries,ussualy have poor multhithreading support or don't have it at all. All in all when you mature past good 2d games you will simply want to skip this one. It is the best for learning but sooner or later you will leave it behind.

If you choose a general purpose language it wont be so easy. Main reason is that you have to learn the language first before even attempting to make a game.Even WHEN you learn it you usually have to choose and learn a game library/engine to use in making your game. There is a lot of work to do just to get anything started. However when you DO learn all those things and learn it well. You will find yourself capable of using amazingly powerfull tools and you will have great freedom on what you can do with your game. They give the best control to you on what you want to make the downside is usually YOU have to make it.

The choise is yours. I will give you some examples of general purpose languages:

C - great starter. Everything you learn will be useful when advancing to the next step. (see below)

C++ - Industry standard and with good reason. Very powerful,fast,full of features. Amazingly well supported,BIG communities,Countless tutorials,books,A lot of third party useful libraries,etc.. Downside IT IS ARGUABLY THE HARDEST THING TO LEARN (to a professional level) but worth it.

C# - Great one. Somewhat easy to learn. Very nice standard library,Very nice modern features,reasonably fast well supported and somewhat elegant to some people.

Java - Also a great one. Very feature rich standard library. Easy to learn and use. Runs on a lot of hardware. Great for mobile development and/or web development. its on;y somewhat good for 3d though. A good example would be Minecraft (it was done in Java)


Python,Fortran,Delphi(free pascal),...

List goes on and on...

Since you did some programming already even if it was just some scripting. I recommend you skip things like game maker and rpgmaker or similar. I think you are ready to learn a language.

You have 2 choises:

-Game oriented language
-General purpose language

If you choose first you can easily dive in game development. They are usually easy to learn and to use. Also they have everything you need to make simple/comlex games. But they do lack in performance and some advanced tehniques such as good 3d graphics,portability,third party libraries,ussualy have poor multhithreading support or don't have it at all. All in all when you mature past good 2d games you will simply want to skip this one. It is the best for learning but sooner or later you will leave it behind.

If you choose a general purpose language it wont be so easy. Main reason is that you have to learn the language first before even attempting to make a game.Even WHEN you learn it you usually have to choose and learn a game library/engine to use in making your game. There is a lot of work to do just to get anything started. However when you DO learn all those things and learn it well. You will find yourself capable of using amazingly powerfull tools and you will have great freedom on what you can do with your game. They give the best control to you on what you want to make the downside is usually YOU have to make it.

The choise is yours. I will give you some examples of general purpose languages:

C - great starter. Everything you learn will be useful when advancing to the next step. (see below)

C++ - Industry standard and with good reason. Very powerful,fast,full of features. Amazingly well supported,BIG communities,Countless tutorials,books,A lot of third party useful libraries,etc.. Downside IT IS ARGUABLY THE HARDEST THING TO LEARN (to a professional level) but worth it.

C# - Great one. Somewhat easy to learn. Very nice standard library,Very nice modern features,reasonably fast well supported and somewhat elegant to some people.

Java - Also a great one. Very feature rich standard library. Easy to learn and use. Runs on a lot of hardware. Great for mobile development and/or web development. its on;y somewhat good for 3d though. A good example would be Minecraft (it was done in Java)


Python,Fortran,Delphi(free pascal),...

List goes on and on...

Thank you for your answer, I suppose i'll stick to C++. Is there any good guide for it that you recommend to me? Also, is there any uncompiled game code that allows me to analyze the structure, libraries and so on? I find that the best way to understand a language is to analyze, experiment with it, coupled with a good manual of course

I would highly recommend Mike Dawson's 'Beginning C++ through Game Programming'

Well all open source games put their entire code on the internet. So you can start there. Also while it is good to learn from web tutorials (there are a lot of good ones) there is nothing like a good book that you can put on your desk and read from while you learn. You can chose from basic C++ stuff books, to game design , graphics library books, game physics books,... Start small. Really small. Like a simple text console question game. Then move to 2d static graphics simple games,then 2d animated games,...3D can be hard really hard.

For C++ there are some nice libraries for games:

SDL - Simple elegant easy to learn has some books on it, a lot of tutorials , a lot of games use it,..
SFML - Simple well designed powerful easy to learn.
GLUT/OpenGL - Ranging from very simple to extremely comlex. Good start to 3d programming. Easier than DirectX and very cross platform. (Very good books/tutorials)
DirectX - Only for Xbox and windows. Great game library in general. Has all you need for sound,3d graphics,networking,... (Very good books/tutorials)

As for engines i can't really say. Since i usually only use libraries (write simple engines from scratch).

First off, learning C is not a great starter language, and learning C to learn C++ is like learning Dutch to learn German. Sure, it may help your understanding, but what a terrible waste of time and resources. C is a very domain specific language these days and for most people is of little relevance. For new C++ programmers, they should be encouraged to stay the hell away from C and instead learn idiomatic C++.


Second, C++ is a horrible first language, period. Don't believe me, read this scenario and be completely honest with yourself, "could you have found the problem?". That's because C++ is rife with this kind of crap and you will be dealing with it from day 1! People say it's stuff like memory management that make C++ difficult, but it's not, not really... it's stuff like this. The horrible linker, the lets support every single bloody edge case even if nobody is ever going to use them mindset, the piss poor standard libraries, the fact its actually 4 languages smashed together, the weight of a thousand legacy mistakes. All of those negatives may eventually be a positive ( except the linker, which just sucks ), but to someone starting out they all work together to make C++ a terrible terrible starting language.

I told him not to bother with a graphics library until he learns the language. And for that almost all IDE's that are out there thay are all set for the go to do such stuff. No linking problems, no library incompatibilities, no stupid stuff like that. By the time he learns the language. He should be reasnoably competent to understand what a library is ,what is a dll, what do the warnings mean. And most importantly he should know HOW to ask the right questions on the internet to solve his problems. There is nothing wrong with that. A person that doesn't know this basic stuff SHOULD not dive in to use third party libraries or yes i do agree hes in a world of pain. So yes C++ CAN be a begginers language. But C++ with a third party library is definetly not.

You know what i agree. I never started big either. I tried learning C++ and fell to just C. Then mastered it and suddenly C++ and Java was a breeze. Yes the standard library is really really bad. If anything you cant really make games with it. I tend to avoid it completely. I only use C library for File input/output and that's it.

But i do not understand why would you bash C. Yes it is outdated. Yes it is not really object oriented (C++ also isn't really). But it is very easy, very well supported,very useful and it makes learning C++,C#,Java much much easier later. Where almost everything that you learned will be used with almost the exact same synthax in these languages.
Functions become methods,Structures become Classes,Bit operators remain,...

The only problem i see is that some people get too much into C and start programming Java as they would C. They will make bad OO decisions and so forth. But most people that i know are very flexible and is easy to them to change the design of their code and approach to problems.