No Experience With Programming - Help

[ArcticJag]

Okay so let me give you guys a run down of my situation at the moment. My friend (Cartridge Kid.) and I were immediately interested in the idea of designing, programming, and playing our own custom games. So we jumped at the opportunity to own GameBuinos. However being imaginative striving sixteen year-olds with no experience at all with any programming language, I would like to ask you all directly what you think we should do. Our goal is to get somewhat proficient at programming, enough so that when we receive our GameBuinos in July we will be able to make our first game. So in a nut-shell these are our main questions.

1.) Where would we go about completely learning how to program C++ (Or C, whichever the GameBuino utilizes.) from scratch?

2.) Do you need an Arduino board to program using that one Arduino programming software from their website? (May seem like a stupid question, I apologize.)

3.) For the sprites, do you make them in the programming software or do you make them with a completely separate program, such as Gimp or Photoshop?

4.) Is there any way to make like a mock 8-bit retro video game (Like GameBuino) on your computer with C++ as like a test before getting the GameBuinos and if so how?

5.) For the GameBuino screen, is there only one shade of grey or are there multiple shades of grey? (No intended reference to a certain book and sorry if this is the wrong topic to put this question in.)

6.) And this last question goes out to everyone. Does anyone know about the music composing aspect for the GameBuinos? Any information would be great!

[rodot]

Hey Arcticjag and Cartidge Kid, and welcome to the forum!

1) Question already asked: http://gamebuino.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=555

2) You can download the Arduino IDE to start programming, even if you don't already have your Gamebuino to try what you do games. But it would not be really interesting. Autodesk made a cool Arduino Emulator if you want to learn the basics: http://123d.circuits.io/

3) You can draw your bitmaps in any software like Gimp and Photoshop, the you just have to run the bitmap encoder to be able to display them on your Gamebuino.

4) Few people are trying to make a Gamebuino Emulator on the forum, but nothing really usable yet.

5) The screen is only supposed to display black and white, but by quickly alternating black and white you get an intermediate shade of gray thanks to persistence, as you can see here : [youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHqHEXQQD6M[/youtube]

6)You compose music using the composer It's a excel sheet I made where you input pitch, volume, duration and instrument for each note, and it will output the code for your Gamebuino. Hopefully one day we'll have a midi converter.

[superfreaky]

Where would I get this "composer"?

[rodot]

It's on the download page but named "Tracker" instead of "Composer" ^^

[superfreaky]

Thank you! I'll use it to make some (hopefully) awesome tunes in the future.