hi, rcandyman24, and welcome.
a few years back,
TGC sought some basic game templates written by the community with the intended audience being total newcomers such as yourself.
those became part of
Games Pack 1 which, along with
Games Pack 2, became Free for all owners of AppGameKit.
inside Games Pack 1, you'll see a "games" folder which houses most (if not all) of the community-made templates, all of which contain commented code where the authors explain what they are doing and why (to varying degrees of effectiveness).
if you don't yet have the Games pack(s), i suggest that you grab them and install, then find ".../App Game Kit 2\DLC\Games Pack 1\games"
then, as a newcomer, i suggest looking at a couple of the simplest, best-commented game templates like Cube and Angry_Blocks which should prove insightful to you.
in general, and i'm no teacher, but
the simple games that i code consist of creating a world to play in, setting some goal with hazards or conditions that present a challenge (which is theoretically FUN
), and player input.
for me, a lot of my coding enjoyment comes from implementing some (single) functionality that i haven't explored before while one facet of AppGameKit that i've come to embrace is AGK's implementation of Box2D physics which you'll find in many of my games (the aforementioned Angry_Blocks uses this).
so, for example, i wanted to make a Pachinko type game which is relatively simple under the hood; i dressed iit up a little and made it somewhat fun and shared it as
Ranch Rush.
in brief, i created a world which is distributed pins or pegs for the animals to bounce off of and spaces at the bottom that i want the player to try and reach. then:
1) drop a random animal wherever the player is currently pointing to (at the top), every 2 seconds.
2) check if an animal reaches a pen at the bottom and add score appropriately.
3) rinse and repeat in a
loop until the 20 second timer is up.
the rest is "dressing it up" and tying to make it more fun. that game was created during a Game Jam which received some public input on
how to make it better. with that, i added a couple of different features as afterthoughts that were received well enough.
this is basically how i approach whatever i do with AppGameKit in a nutshell and i hope that it helps.
the rest of my enjoyment comes from sharing what i piece together which, after you find some success in achieving your early coding goals, i hope that you do