Gaming in C++

Here's the deal, /prog/. Over the winter break, I have decided I want to practice and expand my skills, and as such, design a small applet type game using C++. Now, i am fluent in C++, and MFC, but MFC wouldn't exactly be ideal for this. I fully intend for the game to be 2D Sprite based.

What should I look into, what should I use, and how should I go about things? I've heard openGL would work well, is there anything else I ought to remain cognizant of?

>>4
Well, my point was that the win32 implementation of SDL's rendering components is just a wrapper around DirectDraw, so (assuming you use all software surfaces) you probably won't get much better performance than just using bitblt. And SDL's hardware surface support is absolute shit; you have to either sacrifice alpha blending (because IIRC SDL handles all alpha shit in software anyway), or deal with the GPU<->CPU pipe bottlenecking.

Personally though, I've never really thought games to be particularly useful for learning language features, simply because you can use a little bit of knowledge and hack them together fairly easily and still come out with something nice.

I dunno; it all comes down to what you want to do. I'd definitely recommend OpenGL for rendering, but futhermore, I'd recommend taking a look at the Boost libraries (if you already haven't). They provide a bunch of language functionality (through template hacks): smart pointers, pointer containers, functors that aren't raw pointers, closures, etc. Almost makes C++ usable as a language, lawds.