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[CmdoColin]

Used to write dirty nasty little utilities in perl for my day job.  But with the economy I now work in pre-sales.  The inner programmer openly weeps, and I don't like telling strangers the sales thing face to face.  As such looking for a presonal project - and kinda decided on writting browser games - and I'm kinda after some pointers from people who actually do know that they're doing.

I'm aiming do really basic stuff along the lines of pong/tetris/battleships/that wireframe tank game I played on my atari as a kid.  Not looking to do it commercially - more as a mental exercise where if the game actually plays it's a bonus.  It's more the mental exercise.  Way forward seems to be using flash.  I've seen people talk about Java and using php to do browser games, but they don't seem right.  Am I on the right track here?

The interwebs - yeah.. search for this subject and everyones got an opinion, a book and a tutorial on you-tube.  Do I want fries with it?  That's the problem, for someone looking at the subject from the outside I haven't got a clue where to even begin.  That's kinda why I'm here.  Earlier I said flash seems the way to go.  But I can find almost the same information on doing a browser game in java.  I could spend a year just working this out, and seeing what is a good book, a good tutorial and the right language.  Thing is when I started doing perl I had two extremely clever blokes I worked with who gave me a few links, told me a few good books.  Hence I'm here cap in hand with people who do know what they're about asking for a few top tips, good links/good books.

Any comments/pointers - much appreciated.

Cheers

CC

[Snakey]

Flash is probably better because of the saturation rate (you can assume everyone has Flash installed these days) than Java. Monetizing it may be hard but not impossible of course.

[CmdoColin]

Cheers Snakey.

I'll be honest not bothered about saturation - it'll only be my own machines running it so I control that.  It's more using the right tool for the job.

As for selling it?  I work with blokes that probably could... I think one of them is in the process of selling his mother right now.  Realistically, yeah one day maybe, but I just need to learn the very basic skills.  Right now it's about me learning to crawl.

[Jesseyay]

Flash is good but you really don't want to be programming in the Flash IDE. It's terrible for coding while being ace for animation. I use the Flex IDE which has some neat features like code completion and easy debugging and if you're primarily a coder rather than an animator (which I assume from your first post) it is much easier to use than Flash.
If you're not looking to sell your final products you can get it for free at https://freeriatools.adobe.com/

Good luck with everything.

[muku]

Alternatively, FlashDevelop is a very nice open source IDE for ActionScript. I recommend it.

[Bad Sector]

And haXe as a language and compiler :-). I made Rombo with it :-).

[X3N]

http://www.mochiads.com/
Offers to embed ad code into your flash game and you get $$ with views+clicks. You can put he ad code in the flash file then distribute it to N*million websites.
http://kongregate.com, http://armorgames.com are good places to start with if you want to see what current Flash game quality + style is like. I know Kongregate offers some developer program (they offer to buy your game/fund its production), both sites have ad-revenue models as well. If you make a hit flash game (the next Desktop Tower Defense for example), millions of hits = lots of $$ in your pocket.
Kongregate has basic Flash game tutorials - check the bottom of kongregate.com for the tutorial section.

Good luck