Hi,
I have been skulking around this board for a while, attempting to contribute with anything that isn’t code. I’ll spare you my life story; in a nutshell I have been an IT professional for 20 years (currently a Linux analyst / sysadmin) but I do not have coding skills. I do a lot of shell scripting and a bit of Perl, but I am on a mission to become a competent C++ developer. Please don’t laugh…
I feel I need these skills in order to debug builds and perform crash dump analysis in detail, but as a starting point I am turning to my first love - old games. I’m currently reading “Beginning C++ Through Game Programming, Third Edition” by Michael Dawson (the guy who wrote “Dark Seed” for the Amiga, in fact he was also the main character) which is excellent but it’s early days. I have set myself a series of goals, starting with (as I see it right now) the most achievable:
- Write a basic screensaver from scratch that puts some simple graphics on the screen.
- Write a simple, graphical game from scratch. I’m thinking a clone of “Frogger” as it shouldn’t need any AI, making use of SDL in the interests of keeping it simple and working with APIs. Feel free to shoot me down on this one.
- Port the Free Unix Spectrum Emulator (FUSE) to libretro.
What I would really be grateful for is your opinion of how achievable this might be, and any guidance or advice you could give me (e.g. books to read, goals to set, high school courses to re-sit!). I know it’s not going to happen overnight. I like to think that if I put in the hours, it isn’t beyond me as a person assuming I don’t necessarily need a maths degree. Feel free to call me deluded or just plain stupid, I may need the dose of reality.
I’m committed to this as I’ll ever be; I am going to need coding skills or I’ll find myself out of a job within four years. Besides, I really want to properly contribute to the libretro project! These skills have eluded me for too long already. Thanks!