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I'm kind of an old-school type, so your other responses may vary. :-) First question is do you have a game in mind, or you just want to "make a game"? Essenti

I'm kind of an old-school type, so your other responses may vary. :-) First question is do you have a game in mind, or you just want to "make a game"? Essentially, first you need to work out a direction. If you do have a game in mind then find something to start on, given your maths experience you might want to tackle the game physics/movement/whatever. If you don't have an idea, this again is where your maths might help. Back in the day folks would mess around with the computer, trying to do different animated effects, etc. Those with math would usually go toward animated graphing functions and whatnot, once they get something that's interesting, they mess around on gamifying the hack, making it a playfield, character or goal... and build out a game from that. The third method is well known to artists, start by emulating something you already like and put your spin into it. Got a game you like but have an idea that you could improve upon the concept? then maybe that's the route to start. Once you have the spark of what to do, now you work on making it work (what platform do you want to see it on, go to that platform forum; need 3d support? go to 3d forums; etc). Most of all while doing this is actually writing code and testing out your ideas. Without an idea of what you want, the most folks could help you with is directing you to some type-in game tutorial...

mydpy 13y ago
Hi Larry, Thank you, this is great advice. I know I need to start small and progress slowly so your recommendations are great places for me to begin and improve. I like all sorts of games, but I wanted to start with something 2D. I was thinking a puzzle game to start, which could expose me to some of the event-like structure of programming a game without the complexity of the physics engine (for now). I could recreate a game like Tetris, for example, but that doesn't really seem very interesting to me. I have thought about 'modding' a SNES game or downloading an open source gaming project to poke around and understand how the code / architecture works, rather than starting from scratch myself. I generally learn much faster this way, and would love to find someone willing to help me with this approach. Does that help?
- LarryMade2 13y ago
  That's a good idea, modding something open source. Like maybe changing a game to be something different, new rules, graphics, sounds, etc. The SNES games would be probably way different than modern phone/web/tablet games. On the SNES you are dealing with a single process device so code can be more rudimentary, some of it probably in assembly. On newer devices you will find are built higher level languages (c, python, c#, etc) with code that plays nice with other processes in the device, as well as modern graphics/sound methods. If you are planning to ultimately do code on modern devices, that's probably a good place to start.

mydpy 13y ago

Hi Larry, Thank you, this is great advice. I know I need to start small and progress slowly so your recommendations are great places for me to begin and improve. I like all sorts of games, but I wanted to start with something 2D. I was thinking a puzzle game to start, which could expose me to some of the event-like structure of programming a game without the complexity of the physics engine (for now). I could recreate a game like Tetris, for example, but that doesn't really seem very interesting to me. I have thought about 'modding' a SNES game or downloading an open source gaming project to poke around and understand how the code / architecture works, rather than starting from scratch myself. I generally learn much faster this way, and would love to find someone willing to help me with this approach. Does that help?

LarryMade2 13y ago
That's a good idea, modding something open source. Like maybe changing a game to be something different, new rules, graphics, sounds, etc. The SNES games would be probably way different than modern phone/web/tablet games. On the SNES you are dealing with a single process device so code can be more rudimentary, some of it probably in assembly. On newer devices you will find are built higher level languages (c, python, c#, etc) with code that plays nice with other processes in the device, as well as modern graphics/sound methods. If you are planning to ultimately do code on modern devices, that's probably a good place to start.