Familiar with c++ now what?

[wwnekoneko]

Hello! I've been learning c++ for a few weeks and I'm starting to understand this language a bit, I am getting kind of bored of the things I'm coding and I'm wondering if it's simply impatience on my end and I should deal with it, or if I should simply learn something more than the basic c++ language??? I have tried to learn the windows API and OPENGL but these just look so complicated I'm wondering if I should simply stick to c++ for now until I can finally understand and code stuff?
My goal is to make projects like some private softwares or even a tiny game engine? I have a lot of ambition but I'm just confused about how do I tackle these titans 😳

Thank you!

 

[BorkedSystem32]

Hello there again, @wwnekoneko!

It's great to hear that you've came far. Tell us what you've learned first, though: make sure you know C++ from the basics all the way to important object-oriented programming concepts(classes/objects, inheritance, polymorphism, etc.) - without these, you'll be lost and won't get far(especially if you want to do some complicated programs).

Check what you've learned so far and start off with smaller projects that will practice what you learned: programming books will contain interesting projects of a decent size that will be fun to work on - some you may also have to come back to because they require knowledge of something you don't have.

Be wary of ambition and your skill. When I started programming, I always had big dreams of making game engines, simulation software, all of that stuff - sometimes I still do, however, I pass them off now as just dreams because that's what they are. Starting off with small stuff such as text-adventure games, messing around with bits of data, and trying to automate tasks on your PC, will be smaller but also fun stuff to do as you slowly sharpen in skill. Try some of those suggestions, rather than overwhelming yourself with trying to learn large APIs that have been developed and grown over the years - OpenGL is a good example of this, especially considering the mathematics that has went into making the graphics actually able to be rendered. Maybe consider joining an open-source project too - GitHub will have some good projects to join and issues there will be labeled as "bug" or "good first issue", which are good places to start off at. The only trouble is finding one that you'll like - that's my struggle.

I hope this helps and I wish you the best of luck.