02.00 - THE LEARNING LADDER

Welcome! Glad you decided to ‘take the plunge’ and get involved! If this forum were the Army, then this series of articles could be considered Boot Camp. I’m here to make sure that you have what it takes to be an active participant in the rest of the forum. The level of expertise that I expect from new recruits is inversely proportional to the amount of articles I have to throw at them, but you’ll find that I’ve done my best to accommodate as wide a group of people as is humanly possible. Originally I had intended on making this forum accessible to everyone, regardless of experience or background, but it quickly turned out to be overwhelming. In other words, I’ve had to place a single requirement on people wishing to participate: You must have some knowledge in the C language. How much knowledge do you need? What if you don’t have any whatsoever? Relax. In the first article of the series, 02.01 – The C Language, I talk about the language itself, my expectations, and recommendations on how to go about getting your programming skills in C up to par. There’s even resource links for learning the language from scratch if the need-be. If you insist on continuing with the tutorial without the requisite knowledge of C, all is not lost. Feel free to adopt any concepts in this forum to your own platform/language, but for certain situations I will be unable to assist you. Obviously I’m inclined to provide instruction based on my own preferences, but if it’s any consolation, I tend to use what’s considered the ‘norm’, so following my lead is a decent bet. Climbing the Rungs Once you’ve qualified in the language department, everything else is provided to you. You’re going to be introduced to a variety of concepts that are essential for game development, including an overview of the platform, tools and SDKs we’ll be focusing on. You’ll be informed on what you’re expected to have available (and/or how to get them), and we’ll be glossing over some aspects of general application development that you may already be familiar with, but applying a ‘game development’ twist. Take each article in the series in the order in which they’re presented, and don’t hesitate to make use of the ‘Reply’ facility. There will be a discussion trailing each of the articles where you can make comments on the material and/or ask questions. It is imperative that you come away from each installment with a decent understanding – otherwise, it’ll creep up and bite you later. At the conclusion of the Ladder series, you’ll be able to jump into other exercises and projects without having things go over your head. You will have resolved any compiling/linking issues and be able to build the code that’s supplied. And, most importantly, you’ll have a foundation for playing around with the other game development concepts as they’re introduced. Simple as pie. As this post is the leader for the Ladder series, here’s a good place to reply with any comments or questions about the series as a whole… Teej