New to programming

[DemonicArchon]

Hello all. I am quite new to programming. I was wondering, does it take a program to create a txt style game. I have recently played another one and was quite happy with it. I would like to make a txt based game. If you know any tutorials or programs taht would help/create one(with me programming of course) could you possibly tell me? Thank you so much.

[Markpyro]

Do you want the text game to be in a browser, like Internet explorer/Firefox, or in a window like Word or AIM or any other windows program?

[Mindslaver]

If you are interested in creating software-based text games, then look into TADS (http://www.tads.org/). It is a freeware system for creating interactive fiction. It is simpler than rolling your own text engine via C++ or Java, but it is powerful enough to give you sufficient freedom to make an interesting game. If you want to go past TADS, you will need to learn C/C++.

[DemonicArchon]

Thank you, and browesr style i will dl and try it out, course ill prolly need to find a tutorial or something. unless its straightfoward

[TimP]

If you want to go past TADS, you will need to learn C/C++.

There are tons of other programming languages you could use besides resorting to C.

[King_Templar]

There are tons of other programming languages you could use besides resorting to C.

C++ is fun. But yea, as TimP said, there are other languages. Though I personally don't like it as much, Java can do some graphical stuff easier. If you actually want to do programming languages, you could start at basic. It is called that for a reason, and will teach you the basics without some of the other (though useful/powerful) features that will probably be confusing. Of course, I'm sure others know more about learning programming languages and have better advice than me in that area. JavaScript is probably also a good language to try using. It doesn't require any special software, and it is a scripting language, which means you can see the results faster. It also runs in a browser, etc. You'll have to learn HTML, if you don't know it, but HTML isn't all that complex. Also, JavaScript has some of the more complicated features of other languages (and is similiar to C/C++ and Java), but doesn't impose certain aspects. Look around for JavaScript tutorials if you want to give it a try.

[Sikawtic]

I'm so downloading TADS.

[TimP]

If you actually want to do programming languages, you could start at basic. It is called that for a reason, and will teach you the basics without some of the other (though useful/powerful) features that will probably be confusing.
Quick/QBasic are complete structured programming languages, the simplicity comes from the syntax, not its lack of functionality. That being said, Quick/QBasic are stuck in the DOS environment and modern Visual Basic .NET is closer to C# than BASIC, so I wouldn't recommend that.

A few of my recommendations:
Rexx
Python
Ruby

Languages you should definitely avoid (based on what you've said):
C
C++
Java
Perl
Visual Basic 6 (too old) and Visual Basic .NET (too complicated)

[Mindslaver]

There are tons of other programming languages you could use besides resorting to C.
I did not want to imply that there were no alternatives - there is always Pygame (http://pygame.org) with Python (http://python.org). However, I believe that once you learn C++, there are almost no obstacles in learning other programming languages afterwards. If you want to get quick results, then alternative methods would be better. But if you want to get a job in the game programming industry, C++ is a requirement.