I'm thinking of jumping right in and teaching myself some OpenGL stuff.

However, I have a couple of questions and wondered if anyone can answer them.

I just want to learn it to begin with to right a couple of 2D games (maybe a tiled based game or something before moving on to anything more advanced.

However, having looked into it briefly before it seems most of the time is spent creating 3D objects by typing out vertices unless you know how to create 3D models etc... in something compatible modelling software.

I don't really want to do either. I'm more interested in just creating game mechanics (and at first only in 2D). (i.e. the equivalent of tiles and sprites with 2D box collision).

Just to get comfortable using it.

I realise there are other engines that can do this more easily (Cocos2D) but I want to get down to the basics... erm I mean more complex

Is that kind of thing possible in OpenGL ES? I imagine so it's just that all tutorials I have seen start far too far on to pick up the trail.

Also, do you have any links for learning? Or recommended books?

In fact.

I guess that from the fact that it's a very low level language that you really do have to do everything yourself.

I had never really thought about that before.

Sprites can be done... you just have to do them yourself.

i.e. create a surface and render the texture onto it.
create a timed loop to update the image on the surface.
move the surface around the screen.
etc...

Same with tiles then.

create a tile class that contains a surface, a type, a location, (or something). and then manually render the texture onto the tile.

etc...

Hmm... this may take some time.

First objective I think would be to create a single screen physics sim with a bouncing ball or something. Or maybe a few and have collisions between them.

Hmm...