[Scottbert]

Greetings! I am amazed with the work I've seen done here.

I have dreams of creating my own games, including a sonic fangame -- but I'm not really sure what tools to get started with. I studied programming in college as part of my Comp Sci degree, but that tells me nothing about the tools people actually use programming games. And I see a _lot_ of libraries out there for things like graphics, sound, and input -- SDL, SFML, DirectX, OpenGL... I don't know where to start learning!

What do the experienced programmers here reccomend?

[Delta]

With Sonic fangames in general, they're either ROM hacks or use tools like Multimedia Fusion, Game Maker, SonicGDK, or some other existing engine. People coding an engine from scratch is actually fairly rare around here, but obviously it can be done.

From the sounds of it, you're using C/C++. In such a case, SFML 2.0 is a pretty good library. For a 2D game, it has most of everything you need; hardware-accelerated graphics, input, sound, networking. Another decent one (if you don't mind pure C-style) is Allegro 5 (docs here), which is about as complete as SFML. It just has a different API style.

If you're just starting out with game development, I would recommend making simple games first, like Pong, Breakout, Pacman, Mario, etc. You don't want to overwhelm yourself with new concepts all at once, so you have to build from simpler things. But once you do get to things like, say, Sonic games, the Sonic Physics Guide can be very helpful in implementing classic Sonic physics. But like I said, don't try to do Sonic games as your very first game programming project; there's a lot of lower-level concepts and things going on that you need to grasp first.

This post has been edited by Delta: 18 August 2012 - 09:14 PM

[Scottbert]

Thanks! Yeah, I know I need to make some more basic stuff first, but the same issue of what libraries to use applies. I was starting to look at SFML this week, sounds like that's another vote for it! Know any good tutorials?

[winterhell]

Basically what Delta said, and I too cant stress enough how important is to do those "simple" games.
As for Allegro tutorials:
http://wiki.allegro....0_and_Allegro_5
http://www.loomsoft....lltut_index.htm

[Mercury]

Throwing in my vote for SFML for whatever its worth. The way it handles views is really nice.