I want to go in to the field of game development and programming?

It sounds like you've made a great start! So the first step is, keep doing what you're doing, focusing on what interests you most.

For a programming career (whether specialized in games or not), your best bet is almost certainly to go to college, and major in Computer Science. While you may hear some stories about people who dropped out of or skipped college and went straight into a startup, that's more like winning the lottery than anything else. In college you can expand your knowledge and experience with classes, and it is also worth seeking out internships over the summer, which can give you experience with real-life software development (which, I discovered after programming through highschool, is very different from either working on your own or completing projects for homework).

I don't know how far college is off for you, but no matter when it is, one thing you can keep doing right now is to try out as much as you can with your own programming. Try learning a new language, or better yet, a new platform (have you been writing desktop applications? Try a Web page with JavaScript. Or an Android app in Java, or iOS app in Objective-C or Swift if you have those resources available to you). Having real, completed programs you can show people are great both for college and job applications, as well as gaining experience.

Game development is mostly a subsection of programming. It is an extremely competitive field, because a lot of people want to do it. If you are a good programmer, you can probably learn the specifics of game development fairly easily, so I would recommend trying to be a generalist, in terms of what classes you take. It turns out that developing games is likely to teach you a lot about programming, so games make very good projects on your own time.

I see your profile says you are in Boston. There are a lot of tech company offices around here, including Microsoft, VMWare, Akamai, and Google. Many give tours to student groups, and sometimes hold other activities. It is worth looking to see if you can make it to any of those (or suggesting to your school, if they aren't, that they might want to ask about it. I know Google, my employer, frequently reaches out to schools).

Knowing C is a brilliant start to get into programming games, one of the primary programming languages used in the games industry is C++. You should spend some of your free time trying to make games; start out simple and make something text based like blackjack or try and copy an old arcade game like pac-man with pure C and a few simple graphics. You can then move on to using game engines like Unity or UDK when you're more confident in your skills or make a mod for a PC game you enjoy - games in the steam workshop are great for this.

As Eric said above, going to college will mostly likely be your best bet. You'll have more free time there (for the most part) to practice your abilities in an environment designed to facilitate learning. You'll also be surrounded by like minded individuals who you can learn from, bounce ideas off and collaborate with on personal projects.

My other advice is be passionate! I have no doubt you love games but look at them objectively, why do you love playing X so much? How was it made? Are there developer blogs you can look at? If you like Doom 3, the source code is available on the internet and is often described as "beautiful code". If you want to try a few small projects but are lacking in design ideas, look up "1GAM"; short for 1 game a month, the goal is to make 12 small games in a year with a new optional theme for each months game. There's quite a big community to talk to there and you can start and stop as often as you like.

Best of luck!

The fact that you already know C is a good starting point for a career in game development. Currently, C++ is still the most used programming language to develop videogames and it shares the same syntax and a lot of concepts with C. So you can go ahead and maybe learn that.

You don't necessarily have to learn C++ though. Even though I'd recommend it to help you build a solid base for you programming skills, there are a lot of other options out there to make games using existing frameworks or engines that leverage other languages. Bottom line, it's not really the language that matters, it's more about your problem solving skills and the ability of solving complex problems. Languages are just tools.

Learning a language through robotics or bioinformatics or any other area does not matter, as anything you learn will be useful in videogames development as well. Of course if you manage to learn it directly making videogames it could be better for your enjoyment and help you gain experience (and build a portfolio very early on).

If you think you have a passion for creating games you live an an exciting time, many tools and tutorials are available to help nearly anyone create a game. If you're interested in exploring your interest game development there are several steps you can take:

• GameMaker is a great tool to start writing games with and has been used to release many popular games (Spelunky, Gunpoint, Dust Force).


• Several tutorials are available to help you get started.

While more advanced tools are available (Unity or Unreal Engine) starting out simple will help you discover if game-making is something you want to pursue.

Best of luck!

If you're interested in programming games, and you have some programming experience already, you can get started on some beginner game projects pretty easily. There are a lot of resources out there to help with this - take a look at https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/computer-programming/programming for some ideas to start with. These are in JavaScript, which is a bit different from C, but it's very easy to get started in.