The Implications of Making a Game In Facebook...and Web 2.0 or Something

So a couple of fellow Computer Science students and myself, who are also friends (and also in CS280 and loving life), are throwing around the idea of making a social type game. We were looking at ideas for games as we kind of know a little bit, but we didn't want to get too ambitious (we'd rather finish a project than have a pretty demo). We've kind of determined the game we'll be doing and the dynamic, but then we had to decide on how to program it...

We looked at our varying degree of knowledge between the few of us, and threw around a couple of ideas as to how to code it and get it out there. There's the first obvious one, C++, but that could be a large undertaking to work with that. We then looked at a pre-made game engine like Unreal, but that could make a low tech game look even worse (or it'd take a lot of effort to create some post-processing effects to make it look low tech). There were some other options we threw around like C# and XNA, but we then thought we'd try our hand at a Facebook game after reading how companies like Zynga (http://www.zynga.com/) who were relatively inexperienced at making Facebook games managed to do something with it. So we've decided on a Facebook type game, using Flash, which we honestly don't know a thing about. As nerdy as it sounds we thought this would be a fun summer project to make a game AND learn flash at the sametime. The only question is what are the downsides of working with Facebook?



- The main thing once again is learning Flash. How hard is it? How easy is it to use? We have no idea. After reading about Zynga kind of going with the flow and not necessarily being huge Flash gurus though, that eased our pain a little bit.

+ Tons of people are on Facebook, so that was a major positive for us. Not so much to make it big (we are students afterall), but as a way to get as much feedback as we can and hopefully learn to be better programmers (and having something meaningful to put on the resume!).

- Games on Facebook are definitely low tech and socially focused, this means if we want to get anything out of this project we still need to make sure we're not eating up all our time trying to make some really complex stuff that won't even be appreciated or noticed.

+ On the opposite end of the spectrum, the simplicity might actually help. Working within stricter boundaries might teach us a thing or two about coding and make sure that we keep it simple and to the point.

Those are just a few of the main implications we had to take into account. I think we'll understand more as we get this rolling. Who knows, we'll probably even get some of the early code and implementation of the ideas we have up here. The main thing though, is that Facebook much like a lot of Web 2.0 is a very social atmosphere so the main thing is to make something that appeals to the more casual person, while hopefully poking a little fun at the more hardcore gamer (have I said too much?).

More to come...