Best Wii Homebrew tutorial(s)

[TanMasked]

So, what is the best tutorial(s) for creating Homebrew software for the Wii?

 

[FAST6191]

What do you already know? What are you looking to create?

You will find very little, much less of superior quality to what might exist elsewhere, to take you from never did more than double click an exe file to master game dev. Nor am I aware of anything that might do as a supplemental or rephrasing of that (I have occasionally seen programming tutorials where a base text is converted to any number of languages and systems)
Your options for high level interpreted languages are fewer on the Wii than some other things, this despite the power bump compared to many other things with flourishing lua and python and such communities. Not absent but not as well developed or kept all that current.

https://wiibrew.org/wiki/Lua_for_Wii https://wiibrew.org/wiki/WiiPy

To that end most find themselves using the devkitpro/devkitppc setup to write in C with maybe a smattering of C++ (you can do it and the overhead does not tank it like it might for some other things where C++ is proof of concept only/barely going to scrape past hello world).
https://devkitpro.org/ . Do not old versions tend to vanish and be hunted down rather fiercely so be aware of that before trying to take on an old project to update it and similarly keep whatever you compiled against personally as well.
It features a bunch of examples of things.

Said game dev also includes a lot of non programming skills similar to making a film is more than knowing how to use a camera, or ability to use a word processor is to writing a novel.

 

[TanMasked]

What do you already know? What are you looking to create?

You will find very little, much less of superior quality to what might exist elsewhere, to take you from never did more than double click an exe file to master game dev. Nor am I aware of anything that might do as a supplemental or rephrasing of that (I have occasionally seen programming tutorials where a base text is converted to any number of languages and systems)
Your options for high level interpreted languages are fewer on the Wii than some other things, this despite the power bump compared to many other things with flourishing lua and python and such communities. Not absent but not as well developed or kept all that current.

https://wiibrew.org/wiki/Lua_for_Wii https://wiibrew.org/wiki/WiiPy

To that end most find themselves using the devkitpro/devkitppc setup to write in C with maybe a smattering of C++ (you can do it and the overhead does not tank it like it might for some other things where C++ is proof of concept only/barely going to scrape past hello world).
https://devkitpro.org/ . Do not old versions tend to vanish and be hunted down rather fiercely so be aware of that before trying to take on an old project to update it and similarly keep whatever you compiled against personally as well.
It features a bunch of examples of things.

Said game dev also includes a lot of non programming skills similar to making a film is more than knowing how to use a camera, or ability to use a word processor is to writing a novel.

I barely know ANYTHING about Homebrew creation. I have devkitpro and Programmer's Notepad installed on my Windows 10 machine, but I've no idea how to operate them at ALL.

 

[FAST6191]

I would put some considerable stock in the notion that the best project to learn with the is the one you want to do, and further to that vanishingly few people I have ever met can learn for the sake of learning.
To that end if the idea of making homebrew for the Wii can get you up in the morning as it were and not the idea of learning to code in general then so it goes. It will however be a further struggle than doing it for the PC or something similarly widespread and popular.

In computing the earliest computers were programmed by throwing wires and switches around but later processors became able to read it from things and run it internally, albeit still managing effectively every aspect of code for that given setup. This is tedious and hard so today is barely used (it is called assembly programming if you want) with it mostly being for absolutely secure or understood aspects of code, super high performance code or people pulling things apart (see the halting problem). The first step up out of this primordial ooze will arguably be the C coding language which still has any amount of troubles (the Trucha bug that underpins the initial wave of Wii homebrew was made possible by one such error) but is a bit more abstracted away from the hardware and thus easier to handle. Later consoles upgraded C to C++ whose major difference is something called object oriented coding and in many ways this is where things still sit. Further abstractions can and have been made, Basic as seen on the likes of the commodore 64 being the most famous of earlier ones but today Python, Java, Lua, Ruby and various web languages like php form the basis of things here. They take considerably more memory, CPU time and in some ways lack some flexibility but they hold your hand more which further lowers the barrier to entry -- you can make a nice text adventure, card game (though AI there can be tricky https://web.archive.org/web/2017032...e/duels-planeswalkers-all-about-ai-2014-02-13 and if you want more basics then this video is good stuff as is the greater series it is part of), probably simple platformer but if you aspire to make some kind fo 3d game pushing hardware to the limit you are not going to get very far with such things.

Devkitpro is a frontend to the GCC family of compilers (same ones doing much of open source, Linux and the like) along with some code libraries (code made by others to handle things leaving you less to have to handle but something else maybe to learn about) adapted to work well with the quirks of the Wii hardware. Programmer's notepad can be plain old Windows notepad for all it ultimately matters, but might do something like syntax highlighting for various programming languages which can see you spot certain errors more easily and scan through code once you know what you are looking for. On programming errors then https://textexpander.com/blog/the-7-most-common-types-of-errors-in-programming-and-how-to-avoid-them is a favourite.

I could teach you to compile/build things quickly enough but that is mostly only good if you want to compile an existing piece of code (much of homebrew gets released as open source such that people can edit it and make their own tweaks). Still owing to some things getting a bit out of hand with batch files back when most things have something called makefiles that allow you to take whatever resources are present, convert them if necessary (games tend not to edit files once they have been incorporated in code -- the whole ROM thing and all that so you might leave files you can edit easily and convert them at the last minute), compile the code from the tet files written for the code and turn it into something the CPU understands, and put it all together in something you can then run.
Rather than leaving you hanging though
https://devkitpro.org/wiki/Getting_Started
and
https://devkitpro.org/wiki/Build_System
If you are going in for Lua (not the most common language but seen a fair bit in games -- emulators might use it to do things more traditional ROM hacks would find outright impossible, tool assisted speedruns use it extensively, generally has a bit of a community, some commercial games use things (not sure how much Wii stuff but I have found a few in my limited exploration of the Wii library) then things are far easier to get up and going once you have something and won't need devkitpro or anything like that really save maybe for some of its format conversion tools.

Teaching coding is a tricky thing and can vary massively between people, and their baseline skills. If one thing does not work for you then by all means find another
For the sake of linking something then UNSW computing 1 covers a lot of good stuff

http://programming-motherfucker.com/ being another good resource here.
https://www.tutorialspoint.com/cprogramming/c_loops.htm is a bit more of a reference resource than something I might use going in cold but still has good stuff on it.
apress beginning C is my favourite book but as mentioned people like different things when learning, and come from different backgrounds so by all means find something you like more.

This still covers little of game design in general. For instance a favourite thing to ponder is
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1iNSQIyNpVGHeak6isbP6AHdHD50gs8MNXF1GCf08efg/pub?embedded=true
It details the various approaches seen in game cameras for 2d games. Your programming language and in most cases hardware itself does not care what you are doing here but screwing it up is going to screw your game up. If going back to the videos thing then this guy has good stuff, a bunch more, https://gdcvault.com/ is a series of talks from all manner of game devs on interesting things they encountered and the internet is full of such things in general.