Tips for developing Game on Linux: Stakes and Realties around the environment.

This post is a partial guestpost from Linux.com, where Damien Levac a computer science student at McGill University in Quebec, Canada, shares its experience and opinion as part of developing Game on Linux. The goal here is to create an immersive game that allows players to explore the fictional world and uncover a story along the way.

Here is what Libby Clark reported:

“If Steam coming to Linux shows Linux to be superior for gaming, it might kill Windows and Mac OSX in the long run, because gaming is a very important market for desktop,” Levac, a computer science student at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, said via email. “In any case, if we get better support from third-party drivers, it will be a big plus for everyone in the community.”

In addition to pursuing his degree, Levac is building an adventure puzzle game using Vim, Make, GDB, Clang++, Bullet and Git, among other software tools. 
“A video game is a very "complete" piece of software from which we can learn a lot,” he said. “I love working on projects. They make us explore things and innovate by bringing concrete problems we need to solve. It is very stimulating.”
He’s partial to the “visual simplicity” of Vim compared with a “less intuitive” IDE (Integrated Development Environment) for game development. He’s set up a workflow that allows him to work from home or from school via a virtual terminal using SSH (Secure Shell). And he likes how easy it is to access the libraries he’s using (Portage in this case), simply by typing one line into a terminal.
Following its experience, here are some tips he shares with other would-be game developers.
1. “SDL is a must,” “Especially when Wayland might become the new ‘standard.’ I wouldn't want to program X-specific code.”
2. He recommends joining the ##C++ IRC channel on Freenode as a place to learn and ask about C++. Just watching C++ programmers “argue on controversial topics” is interesting and educational, he said.
3. His favorite titles include “Game Engine Architecture” by Jason Gregory, “API design for C++” by Martin Reddy, “The art of debugging with GDB, DDD and Eclipse” by Norman Matloff and Peter Jay Salzman and “Pro Git” by Scott Chacon.