Mar 28th '18, 16:22
I wouldn't say it's hard, just that it requires a lot of learning. Given a couple hours a day I'd say a total beginner could learn the basics of an IDE, compilation, variables, control structure and basic language syntax in about a week + allotting a bit of time to mess around and modify code for all the concepts you come across. Then give it another week to make sure you at least a very basic understanding of OO concepts + their syntax in the language (classes, polymorphism, privacy). Then give it a week to get the hang of a framework (SDL, SFML, whatever you want really). And then by the end of the month you should be able to finish your Pong game if you've been working consistently.
Can you skip a lot of that and just look up a tutorial on how to make Pong? Yeah sure, but you aren't going to learn anything that way.
I'm just going to let you know from experience that every shortcut you take when trying to learn programming and/or game development will come back and bite you in the ass hard every time you move onto a larger project. If you just try to copy tutorials and then work off those without having the skills required to understand what you're doing, eventually you're going to run into problems so significant in your code that you won't be able to continue coding the project without completely re-writing it.
Edit: if this seems daunting and not like what you want to spend your time doing, then don't write your own engines. there are plenty of options for game developers who don't want to learn the ins and outs of programming that let you develop games writing little to no actual code.