Well don't take Alex's (Traveler) sarcastic/satirical reply personally. He has been on this forum community even longer than I have, so he has seen his fair share of 'new people' who always tell the more experienced ones that they "know better" or that they are special and can do what even the most experienced of the community cannot. It's an old old song and you sung it perfectly to be honest.

The thing is that it is not a crime to want to jump ahead, we all have done it, but we all have also eventually learned that there was always a better, more productive path to where we originally wanted to go.


You see my first few 'games', after I got over my own large ambitions, were rather simple. Here is a brief recap of my own wild adventure.

I started with 'Super Amazing Pixel Guy'. It was a really exciting game which I had this pixel --wait for it-- and I moved it around with my arrow keys. Oh yes, quite the event back in those days [size=9px](you know when I'd walk 5 miles to school in 40 feet of snow up steep steep hills with nothing but 400 page--gasp--books! :lol: )[/size]

But the excitement didn't stop there. I pushed on and created a ground breaking sequel. 'Really Super Amazing Pixel Guy' (2 bah! no one knows how to properly name a game these days. ) This version I had him constantly moving around without stop. But that wasn't enough for me, I wanted a trail behind him. Yup, thats right, I turned it into a tron game. But not only just 'plain jane' Tron, it was much more complex. I added inside blocks as well as the outer wall from which you could crash. I added 3 other players too so that everyone had to huddle over 1 keyboard just to get a multi-player game in. [size=9px](Hey back then LAN networks were not a dime a dozen as they are nowadays. And 486 was king! :king[/size] I eventually added a menu and different player modes for single player and multiplayer; time shrink(walls would close in at a set interval), random block placement, plain arena mode, etc, etc... I toyed and toiled until it got more and more feature full.

Back then the games weren't too complex in visual style so we just used colour for collision detection. It served it's purpose, but as I got on I eventually learned how to confine detection of objects colliding using squares and circles. Arkanoid was the first game in which I did this. It actually started with a bouncing ball program.

It's rather simple, you make a 'ball', you make it move, then you make it bounce off the 4 sides of your computer screen. Thats some basics, so now you get really wacky and figure out how to put in some square blocks to bounce off of too. Heck now add 2 balls. Cool, what if you add more now... wait shouldn't the balls bounce off of each other too? Ha... ok so now it's doing that, why not see if you can optimize things a bit, make sure that we are making use of arrays of blocks and balls and use common functions of your own design to just do the collision on it's own without massive chunks of code to keep track of.

See how this kind of evolves? It's about learning how to do the little things that let you combine them to do the larger things down the road. If you are a self study, you just gonna have to break down and mess around and code some 'junk' for a while. Just get curious with simple stuff. Keep the graphics SUPER-crappy. In fact don't use any bitmaps when you are playing. Just pixels, lines, circles and squares, etc... You'll learn very quickly to make a function and how to organize everything in such a way that when you use the more complex stuff you have the basics down.


Now I tried to write this up in a funny way so that you and others can at least get a chuckle out of it, but I am quite serious about the kind of method I'm recommending. See I was in your shoes myself so I know what will help and what will slow you down to getting to the point of making that super cool Zelda game you want to make later on. You can do it, but not now, at least if you want to 'do it right'.

Even now I could start on some big epic RPGs akin to the Final Fantasy ones I know and love, but it's beyond my level so it would be a total waste of time. I'd be better off starting to learn the basics of 3D and light mapping, etc and so on...

Hope this gives you some perspective if nothing else.