What Skills do i need

[Darth Chunkinator]

I am a freshman in highschool, i am in algebra II and Chemistry. I have learned Visual basic and are learning C++. next year i will be taking physics and hopefully soon after that i will be taking a computer sciences AP class.

 

What else should i learn?

 

oh and if i take math every year i will get to high AP Calculus

[TravisPennington]

English is a good start.

 

Seriously though, it depends on what you want to do. It sounds like Math is an area you're strong in, so keep working with C++ a bit, maybe you'll make a good programmer someday. 3D Studio Max and Maya are great tools for 3d Modeling, Photoshop is great for texturing, and since it's the most available and popular editor available for the modding communities (to my knowledge), check out Q3Radiant. Practice level design. *shrug*

 

Maybe someone who knows more than I (admittedly, not much atm ) will stop by and give you a more detailed list of things you could learn that will benefit ya.

[merry andrew]

What else should i learn?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Everything that you can

 

The plan that you currently have sounds pretty good: high AP math, AP computer science, and physics.

 

One thing that you may want to consider is taking classes at a nearby college. I know that my high-school had a program that allowed students to take college classes for free (usually for their junior and senior years). So perhaps during your junior or senior year, instead of taking AP calculus or AP physics, you could take calculus and calculus-based Physics at a college.

 

It seems like you do well with course material that a programmer would generally have training in, although it definitely takes more than programming to make a game. If you're a freshman, you have plenty of time to figure out what sort of job you'd like, so just keep looking into it and you'll be set.

[Guaigean]

Don't forget to relax and enjoy life in the mean time. Part of working on a development team has to do with being able to work with people. Make sure to get a little bit social occasionally too and don't spend all of high school indoors at the computer. There's a lot to be missed if you do.

[TentamusDarkblade]

i'd also start looking into online and local resources.

 

www.igda.org

www.gamasutra.com

www.gamedev.net

 

all of these sites will help. Also, when you get into your senior year you can start looking at local game devs for internships or local temp agencies for temp positions that will let you make contacts.

[TentamusDarkblade]

Don't forget to relax and enjoy life in the mean time.  Part of working on a development team has to do with being able to work with people.  Make sure to get a little bit social occasionally too and don't spend all of high school indoors at the computer.  There's a lot to be missed if you do.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

this is a great point. Be sure to go out and live life. The more you can bring to the game development process, the better it'll be. If all you know is games you've played and the classes you took to be a dev, then the games you'll make will be lacking.

 

The more outside experiences you can bring to design or dev, the better.

[@\NightandtheShape/@]

My advice, lots of research into the theory behind whatever you're most interested in. Charles River Media has a shedload of books on various topics.

 

Read books, learn about techniques in games programming that are employed.

 

Start small projects, such as space invaders, asteroids, and paratrooper, this is a great way to learn basic techniques.

[Ogotu]

Finish...

 

Seriously, finish what you started, no one is going to look at you once if you have hundreds of ideas that weren't completed.

 

Start small with simple ideas, perhaps a level of a game or a demo, but make sure that these are the polished finished product (ie the best you can do).

 

Don't be too much of a perfectist as well, you'll never get things done if you are constantly tweaking.

 

and finally, don't take up professional wrestling like I did... takes up all your time!

 

Og

[@\NightandtheShape/@]

Also in some circles it helps if you can drink copious amounts of alcohol... Don't know why, it's just a fact.

 

So get drinking. (w00t)

[Whitemithrandir]

You need to condition yourself to accept coding as a way of life to such a point that reading the following:

 

for int i =0; i<100; i++

{

cout << "Hello World" << endl;

}

 

will result in your pants exploding in an orgasmic wave of pleasure.

 

Seriously though... the most important thing, I'd say, is developing a PASSION for the industry. Try programming simple games by yourself like text adventures or logic games and share them with your friends.

 

Then, after taking something like eecs 481 (graphics design) try making some more advanced but small projects like 2d side scrollers.

 

Keep playing around with the skills you pick up from classes and hobbies and find ways to keep yourself entertained.

[Aes]

I'm not quite sure how 100 iterations of "Hello World!" in my console would make my pants explode in orgasmic delight. Doubly so when you use the satanic bracket notation and lack of indenting like that. Everyone knows the opening curly bracket should be on the same line as the statement that triggers the code nested in side the brackets! Not to mention the complete and utter lack of paranthese around the argument for your FOR-statement. But yes, if you don't love coding, you should definately avoid getting a job as a programmer like the plague. 'Course, level design, texture design, modelling, animation and music composition are also important parts of game design.

 

If you're serious about programming, you may want to dip your toes into some companion courses at college. Off the top of my head, I can think of codesign, OS design, languages and parsing, artificial intelligence, numerical algorithms, algorithm and data structure design, cryptography, database design, network architecture, distributed systems and parallel system programming as good places to sharpen your code-fu.

 

But seriously, don't pick any specialized field if it doesn't look interesting to you. You'll regret it bitterly if you end up working 14-hour days with some aspect of programming you secretly loathe.

 

Oh, and going back to Whitemithrandirs example, you need to remember your includes, avoid "magic numbers" like the plague and use the right namespace. It should be like:

 

#define ITERATIONS_TOTAL 100
#include <iostream>
using namespace std;

// Hello world function!
int main(){
  for(int i = 0; i < ITERATIONS_TOTAL; i++){
       cout << "Hello world!\n";
  }
  return 0;
}

 

Oh, and being anal and obsessive about writing neat code will really help you the day your programs exceed a few hundred lines worth of code.

[Hunter]

Personally, I prefer brackets like this.

I also usually put parenthesis around return values.

And you shouldn't declare variables in the for statement like that, different compilers treat it differently scope-wise. If you end up trying to compile in a different compiler you could end up fixing hundreds of those.

 

#define ITERATIONS_TOTAL 100
#include <iostream>
using namespace std;

// Hello world function!
int main()
{
  int i;
  for(i = 0; i < ITERATIONS_TOTAL; i++)
  {
       cout << "Hello world!\n";
  }
  return(0);
}

 

 

I doesn't really matter though, as long as you can remember to do it the way the rest of the team is doing it.