News Game programmers are hard to find

While I am a fairly good programmer, my skills are increased by having someone to bounce ideas off, it worked very well in uni.

 

I want to be a programmer, but I am currently at college and my teacher seems to have an obsession with Pascal ¬_¬ (yeah I know) I'd learn C++ myself but the guides on the net don't help me much. I have a mate that is wiling to start up a project with me when we can use C++ properly, but it looks like this may take a while

 

Interesting. I went to most of the recruitment events when I was at Uni and did a fair bit shopping around before settling on which company to work for (yeah, the times when you could be picky - last February!) - I think there was one poster for a games company somewhere up north, that was it.

Maybe they just need to get out more?

 

The games companies expect too much from graduates now. That has been my experience anyway. Barely any graduate will have any demos or portfolio of work now as, tbh, the technologies are significantly more complex than the bedroom days of old, and there is no time to create stuff outside of degree work.

 

I don't have enough C++ experience to be a games programmer, but even if I did I wouldn't want that kind of job.

I remember a guy from Frontier came to an open day at my Uni and he looked like he was about to collapse. He was unshaved with bags under his eyes, trying to convince us that working conditions in the games industry aren't as bad as people say... I wasn't convinced!

 

two books. 'accelerated c++' and 'effective c++'

then start with graphics programming

 

Unfortunately I am limited to Visual Basic (vb08) at the moment, I would love to learn C++ as it is a very powerful language, I just don’t know where to start

 

Dont know if I am supposed to dig up an old thread here.

Anyways, C++ as opposed to C, and not C++ coded with one massive class, uses a very useful concept of object orientated programming, and very hard to get your head around. I would start with OOP theory. VB uses it, but its very hidden last time I checked. Knowing C++ is for the sake of it is pointless. Oh there's now C#, which is more gear around MS Windows app programming. I guess the first thing to decided is where you want to be doing with C++/C#.