A lot of these things involve graphics. Every time I try doing my own graphics (not using an engine like unreal/unity) I have trouble even getting a triangle to show up on screen. There is nearly always something that doesn’t work like the tutorial says it should and that isn’t common enough to come up when I google the error. In C/c++ I can never get the toolchain working correctly and compiling step one never works even when I pull the authors project exactly. Last time I tried pygame it turns out it like just doesn’t work on Macs or something? None of the examples worked, just got blank boxes. Couldn’t make it past the first few steps in lazyfoo’s tutorial, even unreal engine’s tutorials are constantly being outdated due to short release cycles, although I’ve had the most success with unreal.
I’m not sure if I’m just thick or something, but any project that involves low-ish level graphics I shy away from because I’ve had so much trouble in the past.
openGL is only a specification. and there are many openGL versions. and drivers have different implementations. and modern openGL uses shaders. which use another language, GLSL, which also has different versions. and openGL needs a context to draw on. each OS has different display servers to create those contexts and windows. here we also have to differentiate protocols and actual implementations. and then you might want to write openGL in a certain language different from C/C++. now choose a library or two or five, where each one will deal with one or two or twenty of those issues, plus other things like keyboard and mouse input, etc.
so, either you follow config instructions very closely and repeat until you find one that works, or you try to start understanding all this, get very annoyed and throw your computer through the real window.
> Last time I tried pygame it turns out it like just doesn’t work on Macs or something? None of the examples worked, just got blank boxes
PyGame seems to work if you install the official Python 3 binary from python.org and install PyGame with the pip package manager included with the Python installation. (Last time I've checked Conda Python and the version from Homebrew have some problems when installing PyGame.)
I image most of these 'low level' approaches involve OpenGL which seems to be a bit troublesome on macOS. I can recommend to have a look at webGL, it's basically a limited openGL subset that is called from Javascript. Really easy to get started as it involves no dependencies, compilers, etc. except for (basically any) webbrowser.
Used it for my first graphics related programming project. Was lots of fun and I learned a lot.
Why not write a terminal app? Everything except for the game emulator can be usefully done inside the terminal, which is pretty easy to get up-and-running with (and provides its own unique set of design constraints).
all my attempts at learning graphical programming consisted of getting about 3 tutorials in and then getting to a point where they just didnt work anymore
eventually I ended up learning via the HTML5 canvas element and WebGL, which gets rid of the problem of having having a different setup to the author
I’m not sure if I’m just thick or something, but any project that involves low-ish level graphics I shy away from because I’ve had so much trouble in the past.