Arkanoid port (C)

[Rickmeister]

For someone getting introduced to a language it's ambitious, but then again that's how I would've done it. First get it functional, then you can improve on it.

I belive it to be a great first project, atleast when you like me have about 20-25 years of experience coding demos and games. Most of the gamecode is nothing but linked lists, sorting algorithms and database management. To say that I have zero to non experience in OOP is actually a bit of a lie, you can use abstraction, data hiding and rudimentary inheritance in C aswell, but because of the procedural nature of C you have to write alot of boilerplate code to support this design.

The big thing about larger projects is keeping them organized, if I look at the spaghetti-code I wrote back in the early 90;ies (lots of goto;s, hacking pointers, two-character variable names..) I can say that I have improved. Not that I'm any better at writing code today, but I'm doing it in a much more organized way. I'm never going to be a professional developer, I've passed the big Four-O and me and my son is writing games just for fun (I do the coding, he plays... so far, got him interested so he's hacking in Python right now)

[SilverWarior]

I'm never going to be a professional developer, I've passed the big Four-O and me and my son is writing games just for fun (I do the coding, he plays... so far, got him interested so he's hacking in Python right now)

If you think that because you haven't managed to become professional developer till now you don't have a chance to become one then you are gravely mistaken. It is true that the chance for you to be employed by some programming company is a blit lower than for some younger people. But this is mostly because generally younger people are able to follow the fast technological advancements much easier but there are always exceptions.
For instance I have a friend of mine (actually father of one of my friends) which started learning about programming in Object Pascal about five years ago at age of 55. Now he is employed at one of the smaller development companies as assistant programmer and there are rumors that he might be taking over an entire existing project because current project leader will start working on a whole new project.
Now the biggest irony is that it is I who have introduced him into programming and he is now after about five years of learning he is earning money from this while I still hasn't earned a cent from programming despite the fact that I started learning of programming about 15 years ago (self taught). Main reason for this is probably the fact that with my projects I'm targeting big (don't have enough knowledge to finish them) and I'm not actively searching employment in this area since I believe that I still lack some needed knowledge.
I might be underestimating myself but hey risking my current stable employment (not even in IT sector) currently seems to great of a risk because it could lead to personal financial crisis if things don't work out. That is probably why I'm targeting big as that might bring me some reserve capital so in case if getting into IT sector does not work out I still have some time to get back on my feet.

As for teaching your son of programming. Have you ever tried game Colobot (https://colobot.info/colobot-gold-edition/)
This game is intended to help children learn about programming basics through gameplay. The programming language that it is teaching is C++
One day (if no one beats me) I'm planning to make similar game that would be teaching programming in Object Pascal. If Colobot would be teaching programming in Object Pascal I would probably spent countless hours playing it. But since it is teaching C++ I'm not enjoying it since C++ based and most similar syntaxes are giving me headaches even thou I first started programming in C++ itself. TO me Object Pascal syntax feels almost self explanatory.

[Rickmeister]

If you think that because you haven't managed to become professional developer till now you don't have a chance to become one then you are gravely mistaken. It is true that the chance for you to be employed by some programming company is a blit lower than for some younger people. But this is mostly because generally younger people are able to follow the fast technological advancements much easier but there are always exceptions.

Maybe I should have said that I don't aim to become a pro I'm fine with beeing a hobbyist - programming is my way of relaxing. I have absolutely no intentions of making money out of my hobby. If I wanted to I guess it would be possible.

About Colobot - thanks! Will investigate it further. He started learning in a LOGO inspired script lanugage, inhouse dialect with Swedish keywords. Using that he had the ability to script 'scenes' in a point-and-click adventure I made for him. Not that advanced, but he was able to add 'clickable' items, puzzles, npc actions and dialogs with it. Never really finished that, so we went on to Python instead. We've passed linked lists, stacks and queues right now, so he's getting quite a little coder - will introduce him to pygame soon.