I can only speak of my presonal experience. Bear in mind I am fully self taught and did not have any formal schooling.
how did you (assuming you did) become a good game programmer? |
There's no substitute for experience. You can read design pattern books and things to get ideas, but when it gets right down to it, having experience and good habits goes a long way.
Just keep at it.
Which tutorials did you use |
Other than tutorials which introduce APIs (like OpenGL, etc), none.
nehe.gamedev.net is the only real tutorial page I can remember using. Don't expect to learn much beyond how to use OpenGL though (ie: you won't learn anything on game design)
I ended up fumbling a lot of projects and rewriting them a few times.
I'm to the point now where I finally am able to plan ahead enough to make my code expandable. But it took quite a bit of time.
Did it take a lot of time and effort? |
Yes. Again, there's no substitute for experience.
(or possibly graphical if I have enough time to play with that) |
I'd argue that text processing makes the game much more difficult. Parsing text and strings is a lot more complicated than a more restrictive point-and-click or press-a-button-on-a-gamepad interface.
SO far I'm still in highschool so I don't have too much time to play around with this stuff. |
You'll have even less time when you graduate and get a job. I hardly ever have time to code anymore.