Making a sidescroller

Yeah start simple and build up. Make a map file which contrains data for the screen which you will draw out of tiles say 32x32 pixels each. Make all tiles in a paint package and read them in to your game. Read the map in and then draw the correct tile on the screen based on the map coordinate. When this all works, make the map wider than the screen. Then you can code your game to scroll through the map by having a ScrollX coordinate start at 0 and incrementing it by 1 each frame. You need to workout out that when ScrollX = 1 your first tile's X coord should be -1 and so on until ScrollX = 32 and then the first tile is off the left side of the screen and you then need to draw the 2nd tile at X coord 0 and so on. Hope this makes sense.