Follow the link below to get your copy today, but beware the store is being hit pretty hard so be patient and expect some page loading errors now and again…

https://store.unity3d.com/products

I introduce, though it’s been widely publicized, Khan Academy! Here you can sign up and participate in the practice section working your way up the math food chain. Each lesson covers the topics in 10 minute videos so if you’ve never learned a topic or forgotten it, just watch a video and jump back into the math practice section.

I highly recommend including an hour of math lessons a day for a couple months, at least, if not for life. It’ll make your graphics programming much easier and of course it’ll help in all sorts of other ways, forget about having to pull out your tip calculator at a restaurant again!

http://www.khanacademy.org

Click here for more info

Also check out all of their other offerings. They cover everything from C++ to C# to iPhone development. Some free content some subscription based which is well worth it.

If you’re an aspiring game programmer you better make sure that you’re not doing this for the money, though I hear it can be pretty good. But the road to financial success is long and hard and if you don’t find the idea of sitting at a pc for long hours coding C++, C#, or Java for months or years on end and finding yourself frustrated at what you think should be simple problems then you may want to reconsider your pursuit. Game programming isn’t about sitting around tweaking a couple variables then playing a game for hours on end. It’s about finding programming solutions to game related problems and applying that ability over and over and over until you have a game the whole team is proud of. It’s about having a bug queue that just seems to keep growing no matter how many bugs you seem to tackle, because one fix often causes three more bugs. It’s ultimately about solving problems.

That being said, game programming is an exciting field that can be extremely rewarding. Not only do you end up with a title under your belt that presumably has your name in the credits which gives you bragging rights but you also feel the satisfaction of learning along the way and growing as a developer with your team, assuming you’re not a one man operation. You reap the rewards of becoming a little wiser and a little more efficient and your next project can push the bar one step farther. You usually receive a nice bonus at the end of the project cycle, if you did a good job. And finally you get to see the beautiful art and amazing unfolding stories that the designers and artists put together because of your code.

The path to get there seems like it’s quite varied depending on the developer you talk to. Many programmers graduated with a Computer Science degree and made their way into the industry by simply applying and passing the grueling on-site interview. Some were hobby programmers who made a game one day that impressed someone with the powers to allow them to change their careers. Some started way back in the seventies and just never got tired of it. Some are graduates of the new Game Programming degree’s offered at one of the many game oriented universities that seem to be cropping up all over the place.

Whichever method was taken, they all had to learn to program. Learning to program is in itself a very straight forward process. Learn about condition statements, logic tests, and program flow. Learn about syntax and built-in functionality. Deal with procedural programming techniques by writing methods and sending in their required arguments. Learn about data types and data structures. Experiment with graphics or network programming. Understand object oriented programming. There’s just a lot to learn, but fear not, you don’t have to memorize it all.

It then starts to get tricky when you decide to apply all of that knowledge to solving problems. Casting a variable from one type to another. Creating functors or delegates or interfaces. Organizing your classes and passing the correct data back and forth as pointers so that memory isn’t duplicated and you’re working with the same objects.

As I tell people I tutor, learning to program happens gradually and painfully at first and then it just starts clicking. And once it starts clicking it can become really addictive. Building more and more complicated tools from simple beginnings can happen very fast and often overwhelms newcomers, but it’s the best way to start. Make mistakes. Try new things. Break stuff. It’ll only help you learn faster and help you learn to avoid the common mistakes sooner in your career. There’s a lot to go over when it comes to game development.

Creating a game means developing lots of interconnected systems. Rendering graphics can be quite a handful without a nice game engine, then think about physics, input, sounds, particle effects, shaders, network communications, game states, artificial intelligence, and so on. It’s not simple. But thankfully there are some really good engines out there. Unity3D is a great beginner to intermediate development tool and you can get it free. If you want to go simple then give DarkBASIC a shot, it’s like BASIC, a really basic… err.. easy language, that wraps around DirectX. Another possibility is Flash which is great for web based 2D and some simple 3D games. There really are a lot of tools out there and I’ll try and keep a page with links and descriptions to all the possibilities as best I can, check back for that soon. But know that you don’t have to start out by overwhelming yourself with complicated C++. Start easier, make a couple of simple games and then as you feel more confident move into more complicated languages.

All-in-all game development is something you’ve got to dedicate yourself if you want to be good at it. There are so many areas to get into. In the long run, it’s an industry that can generate a lot of personal satisfaction and feelings of accomplishment. Whatever you do, devote yourself, be disciplined and keep your mind on the end goal, to make a great video game and as long as you stick it out, chances are you’ll make it.