Be a darling, Where to start.

Glitch100

EDIT: God, I feel like a dick.Just seen the sticky: http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=89972 , Please don't bite.

Hey everyone.

Just thought I would start by saying this is a great site. Great resources. Great Talent

Now, to the meat; I am in my 2nd year at Uni doing a Computing degree, I live in the UK, and my coursecovers a range of topics with various programming languages based in Web Development and Programming. I am big fan of programming, we started in VB.NET, and then on to C, and Linux Programming. I am self learning C# and have got C++ on lockdown as well but I am no expert.

My dream is to be a game programmer, I have looked around for internships or contacted game companies or student placements, where I will happily work for free just to get some experience and knowledge.

I thought I would try my hand at XNA, and obviously I don't expect to fly off the ground with success, but I find it very hard to try and develop something which doesn't require some proficiency in graphics as well, I would like the opportunity to just be on the coding side of the fence, but with XNA as an individual I would have to program some graphics as well.

I hear different things for what companies want in Game Development, specifically with their programming language; Some want C++ which I hear is the 'go-to' for Console development, but others want C#, so what to specialise in? I want to keep my options open, or shall I just beast out on both?

I went and downloaded the Skyrim Creation kit, as I see a lot of possibility there, and I have so many ideas, but again, I just want to focus on the development side, and as an individual that can be such a bummer, I don't want to 'naff around with all the models and such, as much as thats cool and the design of a game is awesome, I just want to rattle my cage. In addition I thought hell, download UDK, check that bad boy out. So I did, but my Laptop can't handle it (or the Creation Kit) well enough, and again, I would have to build something to get working on; Now I don't want you to say, well download an example project and just edit it. I don't want to be in the deep end, as a learning thing, I personally thrive from the bottom up building. I intend to get a desktop again soon as that's where some issues lie, and unfortunately university caused me to sell mine. But hey, 21 tomorrow, maybe it will yield some possibility.


Now I am looking for any information, any ideas, any plans you can offer.

If you got this far, and you read it all, you are a saint.

Thanks again guys.

Ben Apuna

Hi Glitch100 welcome to Polycount. It's mostly artists around here so if that's what you're looking for then you're come to the right place.

You might want to poke around the Requests sub-forum to find a project you might be interesting in joining up with.

You could also start your own thread/project there as well, though without anything to show and/or being a well known member around here you might have a hard time getting others to jump onboard. Then again you did mention Skyrim... so that might be enough.

You should also check out http://www.moddb.com/

Good luck!

eld

My best bet would be Unity, it's super lightweight if you want it to be and it's very widely used all around.

Otherwise you'll find game-programming skills to easily translate across different engines or languages.

Glitch100

Thanks for the replies guys, I have seen Unity in places but never thought to look into it, so I will do that and get back to you.

I just want to be a boss. lol

Also would a big mod on SC2 be decent? As I was making a huge huge campaign based mod with their editor back when it came out, and then uni stopped its development ?

Ben Apuna

Generally the advice that gets thrown around says: start and finish something small then work your way up. If you fail then make something with an even smaller scope until you succeed.

Gestalt

I personally like UDK and have recently been learning unrealscript (similar to java). When you download UDK you get all of the script that goes into using the Engine as well as the extended UT specific classes (which you can learn from) and some complete UT resources which you can use to test things (don't worry, when you cook the game things that you don't use won't be included in it).

You don't have access to the very technical things such as the engine architecture, which is behind the scenes and written in C++, but if you are interested in making games primarily rather than getting a Phd to write an advanced game engine architecture, then unrealscript is where you'd want to be anyway. You have all of the script files to access right there when you download.

Obviously you won't be using all of it, if you are making your own game you'll likely start higher up the hierarchy and make something specific, but what having all of this script does is makes the approach quite different. There are many many working functions that are accounted for throughout the script, so rather than starting from the very beginning, to learn unrealscript the best approach is to read through the web of script that is given to you, and to build an understanding of what's there and how things work.

In the grand scheme of things you will likely have access to much more complexity this way as you already have something very complex and thorough to work from (from the Actor setup to replication for online play) and the Unreal Engine itself is very good and very capable of many advanced things.

As for getting started, I'm finding Unreal Development Kit Game Programming with UnrealScript: Beginner's Guide very helpful as it is very hands-on and guides you through the process of making a game (you'll want to be familiar with the whole process of what goes on and what you'll be dealing with). Other than that reading through the script is the best way to learn, and the UDN can help you out if you ever need more info.