I wouldnt worry too much about choosing the ideal, sound, graphix, or comms API at first. Definately focus on single, as well as multiplayer gaming architectures, patterns, what''s good, what''s bad, for writing games. If you know all, or close to, the game programming conecepts, different techinques for the major types of games, and have a good picture of how the overall architecture will look for your game, I beleive you have succeded. Given a stable, and consistent game framework, with sufficient documentation, you dont even have to write a lot of the code. Just throw experts at the different components you need written in whatever langauge being used, using whatever API aggreed upon. Or you could do everything urself, which is never a bad thing. Currently i am doing that. Or maybe a hybrid.