Where can I learn how to program/create games such as Path of Exile?

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SEXYSUPERSATAN wrote:

maybe start out small and build up to something as big as PoE.

Starting small is indeed the thing to do. I was linked to this on twitter today, and it's a good summary of why you should start with small, manageable projects.

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SEXYSUPERSATAN wrote:

Where do I begin? What programming language should I start with?

You'll likely get a lot of different answers to this depending on who you ask, but here's mine, based on my own combination of experiences - learning myself, both initally self taught and later in university, teaching as a lab demonstrator at my university for several years for first-year and second-year papers, and working as a research assistant with one of the lecturers researching how people first learn to program in the first-year papers.

First off, and this isn't meant as a slight against Juicebox360 specifically, but rather because you'll hear this a lot:

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Juicebox360 wrote:

probly java

FUCK JAVA. Right in whichever orifice is least comfortable for it. Maybe the nostril.
In all seriousness, Java is a fine language, and you can certainly learn from it. It is not, however, a good first language. It can be an adequate one, but the point of initially learning to program should be to learn to program - you need to get familiar with the basic things like function calls, branching, repetition and recursion - and once you understand these things, you can fairly quickly apply them in any language, it's just a matter of learning the specific ways that language applies them.
Java, however has enough boilerplate code for even the simplest programs that learning the basics of programming either gets bogged down and confused in also learning what all that extra Java code means, or you just have to accept "you'll understand this later, try to pretend it's not there" about 70%+ of the code in your simple programs, which isn't, in my opinion, a good attitude to be reinforcing early on in someone's programming education.

In my university courses, Java was the language of the first-year papers, and it was the one being run when I helped with the research project on programming education, and I saw this happening first and second hand as I taught people in the labs and reviewed the feedback we were getting from students. I myself would probably have had a much harder time with it had I not been previously self-taught in BASIC.
After that research project (not necessarily because of it), the university introduced a new paper for first year teaching Python, intended to be taken before the first Java paper. I volunteered to help in the labs for that one (mostly because I was interested in learning python myself), and did the lab demonstrating for the Java paper in the following semester as well, and the students who'd done the python paper definitely seemed to grasp things better.

So as a first language, I'd recommend Python. It's not what I used (QBASIC for the win!), but it's a lot less out-of-date, and it lets you get straight to the actual programming without having to deal with the extra boilerplate that Java has:

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Java wrote:

public class HelloWorld {

public static void main(String[] args) {
System.out.println("Hello, World");
}

}

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Python wrote:

print "Hello World"

Object Oriented programming is great (and python does that too), but Hello World shouldn't need to be a class, and neither trying to explain to a starting programmer what "public static void main(String[] args)" means, nor telling them to ignore it, seem adequate to me.

I'll go a step further - the lab book used for the Python paper at Otago University is available online as a PDF here - It might not be the best, but it's not horrible (or at least, the versions of it I saw a few years ago weren't, and I can't imagine they've ruined it too hard since then. I'd highly recommend getting that pdf andPython (the text uses Python 2.7, for reasons explained in the introduction), and working through the book at your own pace. Should you choose to do so, you can feel free to contact me if you find anything you get really stuck on and can't work out yourself - I helped teach the paper for two years, so should be able to sort you out.

Once you've done that, you should have a good basic introduction to most programming principles, and be able to write your own programs. From there, there's a few ways you could go.

If you're really keen to get straight into games, you could make some fairly simple games in Python with what you know, or go ahead and install the Pygame library for your OS and version of python, which would be everything you need to do some decent 2D games - some (not many, to my knowledge) commercial games have even been done in python. I'm not familiar with what stuff exists for 3D in the language.

You could instead (or after, or as well) look into learning Java, which is better to learn once you have the basics under your belt, and will beat you over the head with Object Oriented Programming until you've really learned it (the Python book, or at least the old versions, did cover the very basics of OOP, but not in much detail, because that paper was to be followed by a Java one in the next semester. You could always try to learn more on your own in python as well).

And if you're really looking at doing games, c++ is where you want to be. You could try going straight here from python, although I suspect at least a basic learning of Java is a good intermediary step. My university courses covered straight c before c++, but that may not be necessary. I don't have specific resources to recommend currently for c++ off the top of my head, I'll go digging in my archives and come back if I find something useful - I have vague memories of some decent tutorials for OpenGL using GLUT.

I could upload somewhere the code for the small game I made and sent to Chris with my CV to get this job, but you should probably learn from looking at actually good code, and that doesn't really qualify.