Hello Everyone and first of all, thank you for taking you time to greet me inhere :) Let me start out with apologizing if this post is placed incorrectly, I just saw that this was the beginners forum and I though this would be a nice place to introduce myself :) My name is Mikkel Larsen, I am 19 years old and I live in Aalborg, Denmark. Denmark is that little spit of land just above Germany, just below Norway and Sweden, to the right of the United Kingdom and to the left of .. well you get the picture ... As I recently started attenting the University of Aalborg studying a blend between technology and media (medialogy) I have gained an increased interrest in computer games and the chance of making them myself. I have always wanted to create games or something of the like and my big dream is, someday, to start my own little game company starting out with browser games, littl games like Cinema Tycoon or Fish Tycoon and maybe after a while start developing games for Mobile Phones. My purpose inhere, for the time being will be to try and gather information about designning and maybe building an MMOG (A browser game) and learning as much about this as I can. Though the university and various helping organisations in Aalborg I would be able to start up a company while attending University and get support that way, very interresting :) But the goal for now is gaining knowledge about making browser games or maybe even games for www.facebook.com that would also suit me very well. If you sit there already thinking, "I've got some stuff that could help this guy out!" or "I wanna know more about this dude" please don't hesitate to write me :) And I will probably make myself visible inhere on the forums as well :D I hope to get to know alot of people inhere, talk to you all later! [Edited by - MS Larsen on June 3, 2008 4:26:02 PM]

Since, if I understand correctly, you don't have any previous programming experience, you have a long and tedious road ahead of you, especially for the kind of a project you wish to do.

I would recommend, before you dive into browser programming, you learn some basic programming first. Try a language such as Visual Basic, C# or Python which are usually good beginner languages (and the benefit of the first two is that you can use them in ASP.NET for webpage scripting, so the experience will be directly applicable). Start small, first learning the language itself and then making some simple single player games like tic-tac-toe, tetris etc. Once you get a hang of it, move into the realm of server-side scripting.

There are different ways of making browser based games, all rely on server side scripting which can be done in numerous ways. The most common are ASP.NET (Microsoft .NET framework using languages like VB or C#) and PHP (similar to C# in many ways). You can also do it practically via any other language (Java and even python) as pre-compiled executables - CGI.

Also keep in mind that you will also, probably, need a database, so you'll need to learn SQL (or its derivate, such as MySQL) and some theory on that.

I recommend you start here: http://www.gamedev.net/reference/start%5Fhere/

Hi Koobazaur and thank you very much for your reply !

I realize I forgot to mention my level of experience. Through the University studies, I have recently learned to program Flash ActionScript 3.0 (not much relevance to this, I know), but I have also in my spare time worked on learning C# through Visual Studio. I have an uncle who used to work at Microsoft in Denmark and he provided me with a Visual studio package along with a training book called Visual C# .NET which I have used alot. So therfore I'm glad that you also mention C#.

Also, I have beginners experience with PHP and MySQL but mostly from setting up forums and such, so really not that much all together. The university studies I am in for in the coming fall will feature a lot of C and C++ programming as far as I know :)

Hi

I'm not sure what you mean by browser games. Do you mean a game that runs only in the browser (using server side stuff like ASP.Net or PHP) or does this include browser embedded stuff (such as Flash)?

If it is the latter you might want to check out Unity3D it can run in a browser and you can script it in C#.

MMOG is a massive task! eek! good luck!

JT

Hi Marraboy

I realize that this is a big task, and simply what I meant is that I would like to end up with being able to make browser games in the end, i know that I have a lot to learn before that :)

My MMOG's i mean online games like Travian, ehmm, www.howrse.com is a pretty good example of a browser game with nice graphics although it is about horses, the joy of girlfriends :P

Others would include a website like www.bigpoint.com browser games like theese.