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I've been lurking on TL since... well I remember watching a stream of ForGG winning a title so that makes it... Arena MSL in 2008... oh here, it says I registered in May 2008. So I've been lurking for just about 2 years and made only 55 posts so far.
Largely, the purpose of this blog is to have a space to babble to myself (publicly) about video games and *hopefully* my plans for making a video game myself. I've got so many ideas about gaming in general and TL just seems like the perfect kind of respectful/insightful/nerdy place to blog about it 
I'm also super excited for SC2 and I'm following the beta development pretty closely (even though I don't have a key myself). I find it really cool to see what changes Blizzard makes and how the community responds to them as the game gets closer and closer to complete.
So yeah:
Post.
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very cool, I love discussing vidja gamez ^_^
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Check out day9, he made his own game O_o lots of people around here can help ^_^
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So waht you generally need is at least two things - graphics and game engine.
Graphics :
- draw your own
- get a project-partner to draw you stuff
- borrow gfx from other places for the time being(later when you complete the engine you can work on this)
Engine :
3D
- obviously you need to learn a lot about making 3D and then use eigher Direct3D or OpenGL
2D
- Plain 2D support is being removed from gfx cards for some time now... Still you can use direct pixel access and draw each pixel alone
-> with this approach you'll have full control of what you do but it is really slow and you'll have to optimize highly
- Plain 2D with support of hardware accelerated blit (~ put image on screen)
-> this is probably the last hardware supported 2D function on new gfx cards
- Use 3D for 2D - modern approach (recommended)
-> personally i've tried only D3D but it has a Sprite class which is really straight forward in making 2D
-> advantages are : blit with alpha blend support (which makes thing 300% better) and other possibly other stuff (shader...) which I haven't used yet
-> main disadvantage is the texture is a heavy resource so you'll have to optimize later by putting more frames/images into one big texture
Programming language to choose :
- C# - if you're a starter, this makes things very easy, with only real disadvantage of being slow at some points but you don't need to worry about this now
- C++ - only if you are experienced enough. And I mean it. You can make a horror of code + it doesn't even have to be faster than of C#. You'll be slowed down 5x if you don't know what you're doing and you'll get errors that will make you wish you've gone gardening instead.
- Flash - another approach, many people make funny games in this. It is probably really intuitive to learn(however I don't have primary knowledge of it).
- place to start to get into would be :
http://www.kongregate.com/
- they got neat flash games and even some tutorials for flash beginners!~
One of my favourites :
http://www.kongregate.com/games/kupo707/epic-battle-fantasy-2
(originally came probably from armor games)
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Wow, quite a reply! I was honestly not expecting something so in-depth, I guess that's TL for you
At the moment I am hacking together a basic outline of a game engine using Game Maker. It's a silly little drag-and-drop program but I find it useful for fleshing out how I want things. I'm also working on learning what makes an intuitive UI and (the horrors of) trying to make AI and other things just using Game Maker.
Making a finished product is a ways into the future for sure... I personally am not a fan of Flash (the language, not the progamer hah) so I will probably either keep working with Game Maker if it allows me to do what I want, otherwise I will wind up learning more C++/Python or something.
Until then I am just going to blog about theories I have about gaming- you'll see.
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Python is a interpreted language, not really useful for this kind of software.
Again C++ is great choice if you have a lot of experience, not good to start with well because of many things you have to learn.
You can pick up C# really quickly and won't(can't) make many mistake, hell even Day[9]'s game is written in C#.
GL nevertheless
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Java is a good language as well, as has a hell of a good interpreter/SDK in Eclipse. Java can be ported to most cellphones, websites (as applets) and to other platforms.
I wouldn't recommend C++ for beginning programmers because of the lack of controls, but if you want to create 2D games, check out the open source library Allegro.
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EPT
