Handmade Hero

[Erkki]

http://handmadehero.org/

 

This seems like an awesome project by Casey Muratory. A twitch stream on every day, teaching people how to program a complex game in C from scratch. I started watching the Intro to C on WIndows videos on youtube (these precede the actual game streams) and I think it might be a good way to actually learn programming, although I'm not sure since i'm not very good at looking at things I already know from the perspective of someone who doesn't know them.

 

I might follow along in my own language, just to see how well it would work for such a project compared to C. I have to do some fixes and implement some features that are still missing, though.

[SuperBiasedMan]

I mostly have a background in just Javascript and I'm now in a course for Java where I'm learning the more grown up aspects. I'm thinking that when I have a bunch more time over Christmas I'm gonna try burning through some of these episodes and see how well I can follow them so I have more of a breadth of how programming works.

[iax]

From what I've seen in the proper streams I think some basic understanding of C is definitely necessary. The Intro to C on Windows pre-streams cover at least some of the basics (including a good explanation and a demonstration of what's actually happening when you compile and run your code) but I can't really evaluate how begginner-friendly it is for the same reason as Erkki.

 

One thing to remember: Casey often goes against what's seen as "the best programming practices" today. He has very good reasons for that and he always explains why he's doing it, but of course one has to be familiar with these practices to fully grasp the nuances of the situation. I don't think it's that important for learning itself but I think it may lead to some misunderstandings when communicating with other programmers (especially the overzealous ones).

 

Also, as I've mentioned in the programming thread, it's important to know that the course is a long term commitment focused on the programming aspect of game development. Casey already stated that the game design itself won't really be the focus and it will be heavily driven by what's interesting to program.

 

Other than that, I've seen some of the pre-streams and some of the regular streams and they are absolutely great. I'm bummed that it didn't exist when I had been learning this stuff (not that there's nothing new to me there!) and I had the time to follow a course like that.

[Erkki]

Oh man, I totally forgot this was already posted in the Programming thread. Sorry, didn't mean to ignore that.

[Berzee]

I may never end up watching the whole series, but the introductory videos on how to get a C project building properly on Windows are a thing I will mentally bookmark for sure. =P