I am rekindling my interest in game development. I used to knock up little games on my Amiga in Amos and Blitz Basic, but never really got any of my 'projects' finished. It's now an aim to finish one of these, to a degree that I am satisfied with. There's no plan to make an MMO, or make money etc. Purely for my own development/enjoyment and that of others if they so desire.

Anyway, I'm going to gen up on programming with C# (figured it was probably the best to use, have coded basic stuff in C before, never liked Java). My question is do I need a 3rd party add on to help with all the 'game' related parts like graphics etc. I'm only interested in 2d stuff, have a few minor learning projects I want to get done. The usual stuff like pong, breakout, tetris etc. Medium/long term I'd like to do an rpg type adventure game, single player top down basic stuff, but a good framework to build on. SDL seems a good bet but a search on these forums and others suggest a mixed response to similar questions.....

Any advice much appreciated.

Blitz is still around and a very capable product.

This tube channel has tutorials for a lot of the basic games like Pong and Breakout.

If you have 2 programmers you'll get 3 opinions.

C# supports DirectX, though if you disliked Java I'll warn you that C# is basically Microsoft's C-flavored answer to Java. YMMV

SDL has a C# flavor as well as C/C++, if you're interested in checking that out. It's really up to you to decide what you like. There's nothing wrong with SDL if you just want to make games with minimal fuss.

I disliked Java primarily because of how it was introduced to me as a student, and subsequent experiences with Java interfaces... :D Perhaps unfair but still.. My coding skills were never fantastic, and have been eroded through time and lack of use. I understand C++ might be a little bit of a strain to try and pick up after all this time but I don't know, thats for sure. It was more for the sake of not reinventing the wheel with regards to the libraries that something like SDL gives.

Blitz is still around and a very capable product.

This tube channel has tutorials for a lot of the basic games like Pong and Breakout.

I noticed that but I think a secondary reason behind all this is to get a little foundation in programming in general, as in anyones career.. you never know.

Thanks for the advice, I spent a quiet afternoon in work doing a bit more background research and there seems to be oodles of resources and help online regardless of language/platform which is massively reassuring!

If you would like to make something simple in C# ... I recommend downloading Visual C# Express and Microsoft XNA Studio (I believe you need either VS 2008 and XNA 3.1, or 2010 and XNA 4, your choice).

These make getting a simple game loop take 5 seconds (its a built in project type) ... and then you have 2 functions to put your code in ... a game logic function ... for handling user input, updating your game world and doing collision detection, etc. And a render function, for drawing your world.

It doesn't get any easier.

And yes, there are other great choices (SDL on C# is fine, so is managed Direct X - although I forget the name of the best current wrapper for this, and also OpenTK).

But I think XNA will get you starting your first "game" and finishing your first experiment the quickest. From there, switch if you want to.

Good luck.

If you would like to make something simple in C# ... I recommend downloading Visual C# Express and Microsoft XNA Studio (I believe you need either VS 2008 and XNA 3.1, or 2010 and XNA 4, your choice).

You may have a point, I hadn't really looked at XNA (somehow I was convinced it was XBOX onle...).

Thanks for that.

Having been (not too long ago) in the almost exact same situation as you I would strongly suggest you do as Xai recommended: Visual Studio C# Express and XNA 4.0.

I too used to make games (or rather start projects) in Amos, QBasic and BlitzBasic 3D. (Who can forget classics like:

tl;dr: See first line!