Balbiccini — I know you probably get this a lot, and I sincerely hope I’m not annoying you but…I’m a young aspiring game developer. Right now, I’m in the planning stages of my first game, which I want to be a browser based side scroller. I have some background in C++ (I took a class in community college) and web languages, but not enough to make a lot of leeway. What languages do I start with and what tools do you recommend? Are there any good books for beginners to make a start? Thank you. :)

I've been a game developer by hobby for over 10 years and got into my professional career back when I was 19; just before the "game development school" boom (lucky me!). In short, I now work for a company called BioWare Social in Sacramento, CA and hang out with my wonderful girlfriend Kat Leroux. That's about it... any questions?

Ask.

jessiray: I know you probably get this a lot, and I sincerely hope I'm not annoying you but...I'm a young aspiring game developer. Right now, I'm in the planning stages of my first game, which I want to be a browser based side scroller. I have some background in C++ (I took a class in community college) and web languages, but not enough to make a lot of leeway. What languages do I start with and what tools do you recommend? Are there any good books for beginners to make a start? Thank you. :)

Sorry for not getting to this right away; I wasn’t sure how to answer it so I thought on it for two days and still came up kind of empty. Also, I wouldn’t worry about bothering someone when you’re curious about your future. Only a heartless person would be annoyed by someone aspiring to be something and asking questions on how to get there.

A browser based side scroller is definitely a challenge, but Flash might be your safest bet for cross-platform compatibility. There are libraries out there, like Flixel, as well as a million tutorials. If you want to get crazy, you could technically use jQuery to build a platform engine, but it’d be one hell of a task! Since you’re familiar with C++, PHP wouldn’t be hard for you to pick up, but that would only be used for any back-end stuff you do (leaderboards, accounts, etc.) coupled with MySQL for storing data about players, not the actual platformer itself.

Not sure I can recommend many books for making web-based platformers, especially since I’ve only read game design books (with the exception of the O’Reilly PHP/MySQL/Javascript book I have).

I think the best advice I can give you when it comes to languages is to read up on all of them for your project (Flash, HTML5 [keep in mind the browser support], javascript/jQuery, PHP, etc.). See which ones share similar syntax with what you’re used to and just go for it. The only language I wont recommend for your first language is Python. Not because python is hard or confusing, but it’s just such a pretty and simple syntax that all other languages become a pain in the ass. It spoils you :)

I gotta get back to work now, but I hope this answers at least some of your questions. Feel free to fire any more you have at me, I don’t mind at all. I’m not the most knowledgeable person, but I can always ask people who know more than me and answer your questions by proxy.

5 months ago / 0 notes