Game Developement

[Ashbad]

Is that a common combination by now? That's a nice thing to hear, LÖVE has my full support. Very nice team, good project And another thing: when you say Lua is a simple language, I hope you don't underestimate it. Lua is one of the fastest scripting languages around, offering almost the same speed in code execution as lower level languages in some fields. It's easy to learn, yes, but very powerful. Just like Python

Definitely, of course It's powerful and the fact it can be so seamlessly integrated with C makes it even more so.  By "simple" I was going for more of a "simple to learn the basics with", as opposed to C which is more of the opposite.  Probably a bad choice of wording

As for the popularity of LOVE, a year ago I hadn't heard of it much, but nowadays many of the people I see on gamedev/tech forums are using it en masse.  Personally I haven't done much more than play around with it for a little bit, but I'm really glad to see that more people are flocking towards it and have a better opportunity to learn while making cool games.

[Crow]

As for the popularity of LOVE, a year ago I hadn't heard of it much, but nowadays many of the people I see on gamedev/tech forums are using it en masse.  Personally I haven't done much more than play around with it for a little bit, but I'm really glad to see that more people are flocking towards it and have a better opportunity to learn while making cool games.

It's definitely very nice. Found out about it when it was at version 0.4.x, and I then played around with it a bit. Wrote a basic tiling engine, some keyboard and mouse input handlers and the like.

[Lachie Dazdarian]

I think it is very easy to start programming games today with all the tools available, both free and charged, from heaps of free resources, demos, tutorials, to superb 3rd party libraries for sound, physics and graphics effects. Game dev kits (or SDKs) are another level of making it all easier.

I always considered programming the least challenging and least talent-requiring part of game development. Again, it comes down to what you want to accomplish by learning to program, like if you want to do it professionally and, I don't know, develop your own 3D engines. Also, maybe developing a specific engine like the one in The World of Goo might be problematic.

But in general, supporting/putting into reality your gameplay design, writing, art and composing talents with programming/using game dev kits is easier that ever before and the least problem in game development, in my opinion.

[PixelPiledriver]

I always considered programming the least challenging and least talent-requiring part of game development.

There's another path for beginners:
Skim assembly and then learn C and then C++.
It's a slower and more brutal start, but as you move to other languages they will seem easier.

But honestly starting anywhere will teach you good things.

[Lachie Dazdarian]

Emphasis on game development. Not saying programming in general is easy. On the contrary.

It's still in my opinion EASIER to master a programming language than drawing or composing music, as it is mostly skill, very little talent.

[Ymedron]

I've seen people improve astonishingly quickly when they take up art. It takes dedication and lots of life-drawing, but it's probably not any harder than learning to program without having to look up help every time you want to call up a variable or something.

[PixelPiledriver]

We can make music and art with code.
A program can be an instrument, a canvas etc.
Programming is an art form not a science.

But really I was joking with the
How you perceive it works for you.

Programming made me a better artist.
Art made me a better programmer.
And I'm still not that great. 
To me they are the same thing.

[Lachie Dazdarian]

Perception is a marvelous thing.

[PixelPiledriver]

Moved all the newest links to the top.

I'm also working my way through Codecademy, Javascript at the moment

Awesome. 
Let us know how it goes.

[Arne]

I very much feel my own intellectual limitations when it comes to programming. There are some basic problems which I just can't wrap my mind around because they are so completely beyond me, despite me having programmed on and off for decades. Meanwhile, some clever 16 year old does it with ease, and I'm not getting any smarter. With art, though I've never been a prodigy, I've always felt that I can at least reach many of the more appealing goals with some persistence.

On the topic of beginner's languages, I like to use BlitzMax because I started with C64 BASIC long ago. BlitzMax is BASIC which scales pretty well into an OOP form. You can learn concepts like the sequentiality of instructions, loops, jumps, various variables, move onto arrays, includes, then classes, pointers and linked lists, polymorphism, even inline asm, etc.  I wouldn't list BlitzMax as game engine. It's easy to get an OpenGL graphical display up and draw stuff, but to my knowledge there's no way around programming everything that you want to happen. There are no object/map/physics editors or anything like that.