Question

I’ve been on and off intrested in making a text based browser game.
I have been turned off by the idea because of the daunting amount of things to learn.

PHP (or another sever side scripting language)
Javascript
HTML
MySql

And the fact of severs and apache..

Can I just pay for web hosting and by-pass having to set-up apache?

Also how long will it take me to learn all thoose things well enough to start work on my game?

Should I just stick with Flash and then C# for XNA?

Answer 1

• Do you have a specific game in mind?
• Does it need to be multiplayer?
• In the initial stages, does it require server interaction at all?

Conversely,

• Are you interested in the possibility of building a working game first, and adding in features like saving high scores, multiplayer, or other server-interactions later?
• Is a self-contained game like nethack or Hitchhikers a good starting place for you?

If your initial game does not require server interaction, you can build quite complex games using only HTML and JavaScript. This will reduce the number of concepts and languages you need to learn up front.

Once you have had some practice building non-trivial games in HTML and JavaScript, you can then add in features like server-integration, and learn a server-side language like PHP, Python, Perl, ASP.NET, or Ruby…

You can definitely pay for hosting, and eliminate the effort of setting up and maintaining a server yourself. A quick search will find you a number of web hosting sites to choose from.