Starting off

Jumping from text to 2d games wasn't very hard for me. Its mostly just storing positions of objects and updating them based on input and such.

All practise is good practise. But I would argue that although coding is the funny part, you should also try to put some effort and time into reading stuff. Doesn't have to be a book, but articles here and there and try to use what you learn, in your text based games. Either way, when you feel like it, you can just pick up a 2D engine and code tic tac toe and so forth. My first 2D engine was HGE if you are interested in that.

The biggest problem with moving past console games isn't really code related. Its the fact you have to deal with the POS C++ linker. This is where most new developers fall on their face.

You should try SDL library with C++, it allows you to create window, then put images into it. Therefor you can make 2d games with it. Also then u can add SDL_TTF and SDL_MIXER for text and sound. Heres a good tutorial on starting out on it

hope that helps

If you want to learn SDL and 2d programming use Lazy Foo's website. His tutorials are the best I've seen on the net, they explain how to get everything up and running perfectly. The way he breaks up his tutorials makes it really easy to understand how each bit works. They're not particularly well coded (globals everywhere and all in one file) but they get the idea across.

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If you want to learn SDL and 2d programming use Lazy Foo's website. His tutorials are the best I've seen on the net, they explain how to get everything up and running perfectly. The way he breaks up his tutorials makes it really easy to understand how each bit works. They're not particularly well coded (globals everywhere and all in one file) but they get the idea across.

Agreed with Sednihp, Lazy Foo's got really good tutorials on SDL, just make sure when u add linker, you dont mess up lower case L's and upper case i's with eachother. I remember lazy foo got that wrong. Took me couple hours to figure out whats wrong since i copy and pasted from his web. Unless he changed that back by now

If I may offer a self-serving plug check out:
http://www.programming2dgames.com

All of the example programs include full source code.