Any Updates on the Game Programming Track ?

[Arnon Marcus]

I am really into this of late...

Am learning from CS-recorded-courses from a few universities, and ramping-up to be ready for game-development.

I love python, and been using it daily at work for a few years now, but am now concentrating on C and C++.

I would really love a Python-based game-dev course though, and your 'game-plan' (pun intended) fits me perfectly.

I love all of your stuff, and have already watched most of them over the years (10x a bunch BTW...).

I was thinking of contributing to the kickstarter-campaign before noticing how long ago it was... :)

I think I will donate some money in the main site though...

Any plans for completion of the game-dev thing then?? :D

[Brian Will]

Hi Arnon,

I'm currently working on redos of some of my earlier videos, many of which have terrible sound quality and could besides use some restructuring. For example, I just replaced my videos on Clojure, the very first ones I did back in 2009. At this very moment I'm working on the redo of the videos on C. I expect to have these redoes all done in a few months.

I haven't forgotten about the game programming series, but I have been rethinking the approach. Things looked different back in 2012, but now I think game programming in Python is a dead-end and doesn't really offer any advantages, even for newbies. What looks really promising now are that engines like Unity and Unreal are more accessible than ever. Unity especially seems like a really good entry point: you can write your game's logic in a garbage-collected environment (C# or Javascript), and the engine handles the low-level stuff. Despite this, it gives you considerable power to customize low-level behavior, such as the ability to write custom shaders without having to learn direct3d or opengl. 

My original idea was to build up from a low-level foundation of essential algorithms and math for 3d rendering. But now I think game programming is probably best learned from both bottom-up and top-down at the same time. Unity gives you a very accessible entry point from the top-down: it's accessible but not a toy, and plenty of real, commercial games get created with it.

I've also been experimenting with techniques for expressing game logic in functional programming. What I have in mind is a twist on FRP (Functional Reactive Programming) appropriate for games. The hope is that functional programming will make game logic much easier to create and modify if we can minimize the usual headaches of mutable state.

So after finishing my general programming video redoes, I'll make more game programming videos that introduce Unity and explain how to apply functional programming to games. In the meantime, I recommend working through the Unity tutorials and manual as the best path into actually making games. Good luck!

--Brian

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