Video Game Programmer WANNABE . Any advice ?

[polm]

I have been a Network Engineer for a long long time. As a child my dream was to write video games, but unfortunately it never happened. I was too broke to pay for college and the I.T. world was/has been easy to take advantage of. Now I am ready to give it all up and learn something new. I want to wirte games. Any suggestions on where to start ? I will have to do this all on my own, as I will be living on a Kibbutz in Insrael for the next few years, and I will not have access to any education facilities. I will have a laptop and a bookshelf.

 

[tweakmm]

what programing languages do you know?

 

[polm]

Perl...thats it. I have only needed to code Admin scripts thus far in my career.

 

[tweakmm]

you are going to need to know C++

 

[Ameesh]

Originally posted by: tweakmm
you are going to need to know C++

hes gonna need to learn a lot more then c++ you'll need to learn a lot of math too. go to college if you want to be a game programmer, digipen is renowned for their circilum.

 

[BCYL]

Originally posted by: Ameesh

Originally posted by: tweakmm
you are going to need to know C++

hes gonna need to learn a lot more then c++ you'll need to learn a lot of math too. go to college if you want to be a game programmer, digipen is renowned for their circilum.

Companies like EA usually look for stuff like AI programming, 3D graphics programming, etc...

Simply knowing C++ wont do you much good...

 

[rbhawcroft]

Originally posted by: polm
I have been a Network Engineer for a long long time. As a child my dream was to write video games, but unfortunately it never happened. I was too broke to pay for college and the I.T. world was/has been easy to take advantage of. Now I am ready to give it all up and learn something new. I want to wirte games. Any suggestions on where to start ? I will have to do this all on my own, as I will be living on a Kibbutz in Insrael for the next few years, and I will not have access to any education facilities. I will have a laptop and a bookshelf.

how are you going to write a game on your own? are ID going to give you a graphics engine? what type of game are you going to do? A Palestine Now?

 

[csiro]

Try GameDev or Gamasutra. They should have everything u wanted to know about game development. You could always team up with some people in the forums over there who's looking to start a game project...

 

[tweakmm]

Originally posted by: Ameesh

Originally posted by: tweakmm
you are going to need to know C++

hes gonna need to learn a lot more then c++ you'll need to learn a lot of math too. go to college if you want to be a game programmer, digipen is renowned for their circilum.

I meant as a start

 

[CrazyDe1]

learn directx

 

[MSantiago]

Yeah, Gamasutra and GameDev are really great for gaming industry info. I took a game design class here at UC Irvine last quarter and I got to meet Feargus Urquhart of Interplay and Tim Cain (former lead producer of Fallout and now owner of Troika Games). They talked about the industry in general, but they also touched on how to work your way up the ranks. If you don't have much experience with development, your best bet is to apply for a QA testing job. It's tedious work and it's not exactly rewarding, but if they see that you're working hard and that you're finding bugs, you might just get pulled out of testing and get handed an entry level job as a junior scripter or something similar. Even if you don't have all the technical skills, they'll hold your hand and give you a bit of training if they see that you have the desire to learn.

 

[MSantiago]

Almost forgot -- if you want to get some 3D graphics skills, take a look at NeHe's OpenGL Tutorials over at GameDev. Those helped me a lot with my OpenGL projects in that game design class. 3D programming is basically the same no matter which API you use. I'd suggest learning OpenGL with NeHe's tutorials first. If you want to move to Direct3D, it won't be a long jump.

edit: fixed link