Heyo! Been forever and a day, but I'm back, and hopefully to stay. And be productive, because like most others here, I've a game idea I want to see come to fruition. As such, I've disconnected WoW and Guild Wars and other non-productive distractions, trying to get down to business. Part of getting down to business for me is 'accountability', which will likely be taking the form in at-least-weekly journal updates. For now I'll be using this /old/ journal, but if my game starts to see progress and take off, it will get its own separate journal. For now, the game's ideas and concepts shall remain hidden in mysterious shadowy shadows.

In the past week or so, in my spare time between whatnot, I've been researching what I'll need to be using to get the job done. It's a bit tricky since I've not done graphical game development in awhile, though I have been productive for a MUD of late, so I'm not really inexperienced, per se; however, I tend to like to reinvent the wheel, depending on the wheel, and learn best by failing. We'll see how this plays out. For now, the technologies and other stuff I've been looking at and thoughts regarding them (this is where I'd greatly appreciate feedback/criticism, for those so inclined):

C#/Mono - Language (client/server/everything)

Hopefully sidestepping Holy Wars and whatnot, I have some experience and memories of C# a few years ago, fond memories all. My language experience of late has largely been VBA, custom scripting language for the aforementioned MUD, and a bit of Java/Javascript/HTML/CSS. I'm more familiar with some of these, and other languages, but it has been a good while and I recall only more concepts than anything language specific, really. Regardless, my previous C# experience was all .NET, but as I would like for my game to be more cross-platform inclined, I've been looking at Mono and it seems to fit the bill, though I've yet to test how difficult it is to target to other platforms, just what I've seen on the web.

Awesomium - GUI

So one of the areas which I'd rather not reinvent the wheel too much if I can help it is the area of GUI. I had attempted some time ago to make a little coder control, and may end up picking that up again for all I know, but I realized that I got too caught up in the nuances and didn't make it very far. I honestly don't remember how far I made it, but I did learn a bunch of neat stuff, which I've since forgotten. Anyway, Awesomium looks to be a neat little HTML UI Engine for .Net/Mono. While I'm not sure of how badly this will effect performance, etc., I do like the idea of using HTML/CSS/javascript for GUIs in a game. Saves me a lot of trouble, and it can use existing technologies. I had looked at other such things, notably Chromium/Blink/etc, but they seemed...not as ready out of the box as I'd like at the moment, though I might end up using them in the future. Awesomium is free "for teams with <$100k revenue", so I should be good for a long while.

Google Cloud or Amazon Cloud - Servers/Databases

So my game idea certainly isn't a dreaded MMO idea (I recall comics about marrying the Hulk which were post here, some time ago), but it does require servers and databases. I know that I'd like for it to scale, both in case it does take off and in case it doesn't, the latter so I don't end up wasting money for unused resourced. I'm currently torn between Google Cloud and Amazon's Cloud, partly due to server ignorance since I've little to no experience with such things (I plan on starting out simple with the game, using it as a conduit to learning). I am somewhat of a Google fanboi, so I'm inclined to lean towards them, especially since I can just go all Google and use their APIs to handle any future purchasing abilities or to login, instead of having a separate username/password/whatever just to track and play. On the other hand, Amazon's seems to be more popular, and I honestly don't know if this is just a service thing or if Google's has yet to catch on. Another thing I guess I dread is setting all of this up for Google's only to have it be faded out like Google Wave and other such technologies.

SDL/OpenGL - Graphics

So this is where part of my reinventing the wheel issue comes in. I'm not so bad where I want to go all hardcore and use nitty gritty hardware calls, but I do want to write my own engine for handling things, partly because that's where I get my enjoyment. I will be open and say I've little 3D graphics experience, having written nothing more than a few tech demos almost, gosh, a decade ago (so old...). As with the server, I plan on starting out small and slowly implementing more of the custom engine using SDL/OpenGL over time. It will likely require occasional rewrite of the engine/code, but I honestly feel that code, or at least parts of it, should be rewritten entirely if new features and such have been slapped on over time.

So there you have it, at least one item I'm still not sure on, and all of them I'd love input before I get cracking. I realize there will likely be (quite) a few responses about starting out small on server/3D graphics stuff, but I'd like to at least try to learn as I go with the game, and failing that perhaps step back and write smaller demos working my way up. (I'm quite likely to sandbox newly learned stuff anyway, in small small demos, but then just slap that in the main game and rewrite it after it has a good bit slapped together).

Thanks for reading, and Cheers!