   Where Do I Start?
  First off... I would just like to say HI to everyone. Secondly, I was wondering if you could help me? I'm a total n00b that wants to get into designing games. Me and a friend have some amazing ideas and we want to develop them into a interactive games. A couple of our ideas would be great as first person shooters and others as third person. I know, to be looking this far ahead is insane just now, seen as we have no programming skills at all but hey.... you gotta have a dream to follow :DSo, all in all, we have great spirit and a burning desire to succeed in this tag team. I've looked around on the internet and I've ordered some books on games designing and C++ for beginners. However, I am totally clueless with the sort of programs I need to be using. I mean... Visual studio 2008 pro, is that any good? What do I need? Can you create a whole game in one program or do you have to use multiple programs and then compile them (I havent a clue on what I just said but it sounded goooood). Any help would be great. I'm no techy so use simple terms if possible :DThanks in advanceLee   
  Visual Studio 2008 is the de facto IDE (Integrated Development Environment) for coding in Windows. Microsoft has released Express edition for programming in various languages (C#, C++, Visual Basic) with Visual Studio. If you are a student (which I'm guessing you are) then look into Microsoft's program called Dreamspark, which will allow you to obtain Visual Studio 2008 Professional for free.That is just for coding, though. You'll need graphics applications to make assets to use in game. If you're making a 2D game you can use Photoshop, Gimp, Paint.net, or any other 2d raster (pixel based) graphics application to make bitmaps (images) to use. You also use these applications to make textures for your 3d models.For making 3D models there are tons of options as well. Some free options are XSI Mod Tool, Blender, and the latest version of TrueSpace. Some commercial (re: expensive) softwares include Maya, 3ds Max, XSI, Zbrush, Cinema4D, Lightwave, Modo, and Mudbox. Each application has its own strengths and weakness that will become apparent as an artist experiments with each of them. Starting out though I would recommend XSI Mod Tool. The reason for this is that it has built in support for exporting out assets (models/textures/animations) for XNA and the Half-life 2 engine, called Source. You can also download an exporter for the Unreal engine for it.After spending some time learning to program (or model or whatever else you want to do) then look into getting into the modding community if developing a 1st person shooter is what you would like to do. There are tons and tons of tutorials for modding the Source engine and the Unreal engine. You can do simple mods such as just making a weapon stronger and then gradually work your way up to producing a TC (total conversion).Best of luck.   ;  If you want help you can just go to main page and theres a link for beginners :http://www.gamedev.net/reference/start_here/ and asking stuff without looking there is just spaming. You can look and find many people asking where to start(me too) and it looks like the members need to find books for programing for them but they can do that :D by their selves.   ;  xfront - Thaks for the link. This isnt spamming really I just dont have endless amounts of time to search through every website I come too. zer0wolf - Cracking info mate thats put a couple of questions to rest that I had. Its also given me a good foundation on where to start. Just waiting for my books to arrive so I can start studying. Thanks again m8 I really appreciate the info.Lee   ;  If you want to do some studying while you wait there is always cplusplus.com that you could try.   ;Quote:Original post by Keeling1985This isnt spamming really I just dont have endless amounts of time to search through every website I come too. Yeah, well. We have endless amounts of time to rewrite all the frequently-given answers for every newbie who doesn't have time to read the FAQs.