I'm not a dev noob, but definitely never done anything in game dev. There is a trump based card game we play in town that I plan on coding. I'll be either using python/ajax/pyqt or c++/qt.
My question is as follow, what kind of advice would you give to writing card based games?
I'm not really sure what card game you're trying to create, but here are the general steps I would go through:
The process is a little slow, but it has a number of benefits to someone in your situation:
Best of luck on your programming adventure! If you have any questions or something seems unclear, let me know. :)
The good news about card games is, they are some of the simplest to program, so this is a great first project for getting into game dev. Why? Because you don't have to deal with a great deal of graphics (simple sprites for the cards, no scrolling, no 3d, not even necessarily any animation) nor do you require realtime input (when you say "trump based" I assume this is a turn-based game where you select cards one at a time to take tricks), so the event-driven programming that you're used to in more general software development can apply here just fine.
If you're an experienced programmer, there are likely only two things you'll need to learn here. One is how to draw sprites to the screen, which is not terribly hard -- there are tons of libraries that will let you do this, PyGame has the functionality built in if you go with Python. The other is, assuming this is a multiplayer game to be played over the internet, you'll need to figure out how to establish a connection and send messages over a network. But that's really it... aside from that, treat it like any other software project.
AJAX/PyQT? Not sure how that would work out. Card games aren't especially complicated unless you are trying to make some kind of generic card game engine (don't do that). Just don't focus too much on the tech, pick something you are comfortable with and make it fun first. Once it is fun, worry about making it snazzy.
