Ask Slashdot: How To Find Expertise For Amateur Game Development? 188
New submitter es330td writes "I'd like to write a program that takes the old cannon game to another level, but instead of the path being a simple parabolic arc, the projectile will move through a field of objects exerting gravitational attraction (or repulsion) and the player will have to adjust velocity and angle to find the path through the space between launch point and the target.In an ideal world, this would end up as one of these Flash based web playable games, as that would force me to fully flesh it out, debug and complete the app. I doubt this will ever be commercial, so hiring somebody doesn't make sense, and I wouldn't learn anything that way either. I have been programming for almost 20 years, but the bulk of my work has been in corporate programming, primarily web (Cold Fusion, ASP & C#.Net,) or VB6 and then C# Windows GUI interfaces to RDBMS. I have never written a graphics based game, nor have I ever written something using the physics this will require. Once upon a time, I could program in C but I think I would be much better off to work with someone rather than try to roll my own unless good books exist to flatten the learning curve. Any advice on how to proceed?"
Re:Too late! (Score:5, Interesting)
There is a slightly more "flashy" version called gravitee wars [kongregate.com]. Polished and stuff.
Re:Moron (Score:5, Interesting)
I think that's the point of his Ask Slashdot - he has an idea for a game and he wants to play it. Asking a bunch of geeks how to implement it is the easiest way of getting something like this done. And he's right - it does sound fun, and I hope someone does implement it because I'd like to play it too.
For what it's worth, I wrote an n-body-problem simulation / visualisation thing in JavaScript (for no serious reason, just because I wanted to play with the canvas tag and it makes pretty patterns) and it was pretty trivial. Add half a dozen lines of collision detection to that and there's your game, aside from the UI - most of the work will be in the graphics, and even then you could largely use circles and bezier paths...
Re:Too late! (Score:5, Interesting)
It was done in Flash games long before Angry Birds decided to do it.
I like to call it the iPod Effect -- people assume that whatever company gets rich with an idea must have been the one to invent it.