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Programming / Re: Roguelike Game Engines or Developer Wanted.
« on: March 03, 2009, 01:24:32 AM »You're probably correct. However, learning to program with an end goal in mind is a bit different than having programming experience and moving on to an extensive project.
By that I mean that learning to program from scratch is one thing. Learning to program from scratch on a multi-thousand line programmed game is something else. At my current "Hello World" level of programming expertise, simply understanding the dungeon creation algorithms and how they are used is asking quite a bit.
It's not so hard. I picked programming up from scratch last September, and got a basic game out in January, in spite of having very little time to learn or do work on it. And I started from absolute scratch, inventing my own line-drawing algorithms and so on (because I was too dumb to read other peoples code). Free Pascal helped a lot - it's very easy to learn if you have no coding history. If you want to code purely for gaming then you really don't need to know much programming - just some basic display and math libraries and how to handle conditions and loops. If you want a well-coded game you can learn pointers and OOP, but it's actually not necessary. Another important thing to remember is to start out small - your ideas are big, and won't get anywhere unless you start out with an extremely stunted version of them.
For help on learning some basics it can do a lot of good to read some article on RogueBasin. An excellent starting point is this one:
http://roguebasin.roguelikedevelopment.org/index.php?title=How_to_Write_a_Roguelike_in_15_Steps