Thanks for the great responses guys!
Quote:
Originally Posted by meekrab
You should probably familiarize yourself with the changes to C++ that have occurred since you last used it. C++0x/C++11 incorporates a lot of 'modern' language features that make development faster/safer.
Also, since Microsoft is doing their best to kill Windows' desktop marketshare, I'd probably stay away from investing any time into C#. It's a perfectly nice language, but it doesn't do anything Java can't do more portably.
Sweet. Sounds great regarding Java > C# (I personally agree). And I'll definitely read up on changes in 0x/11 whether I go this route or not.
Quote:
Originally Posted by muttiah
For desktop games C++ is still the standard. Since it is 2D game have you considered mobile platform? Or a dynamic language like python (lots of libraries and rapid development time).
If you want to learn the bleeding edge technology/approaches you must use C++ and get used to DirectX.
Ooooo Python is a very attractive option that I hadn't considered... Not interested in mobile platform at all since this is basically a 100% personal re-education project. If by some wild stretch of probability the game comes out awesome, maybe I'll spread the fun, but I don't have much interest otherwise.
Basically there's 2 major goals of this project (while simply satisfying my desire to "program" in some of my free time): 1) learn/re-familiarize myself with technology that will likely be relevant in my future career, or just good to know in general really and 2) satisfy my creative desires (I've always thought I could write awesome stories and incorporate pretty unique concepts in games, just to toot my own horn a bit
). But neither of these really involve getting into the cutting edge of the actual GAME part of the game programming. FWIW what I have in mind is basically a type of 2d turn-based strategy / tactical rpg. So the fact that this should be pretty low on computational requirements, past desires to learn the language, and the 2 points you yourself mentioned are making Python stand out to me quite a bit right now. And I think Python could be very useful and relevant in a different set of ways (the obvious scripting / rapid development benefits, I'm never gonna be developing really intense commercial software).
So call this my tentative decision, but if there's relevant suggestions/discussion about this project still I'm all ears!
Thanks again for the quality posts.