Development Environment

A lot of people ask how they can start/learn to develop browser based game, hopefully this article will help get them started. This article may be helpful to developers who are struggling to make changes / develop games without disturbing the production version.

The development environment comes into play for both these circumstances. There are a number of ways to setup your development environment. The solution is both short and sweet.

Please keep in mind this is only good for development teams of 1 or 2 individuals, you will need to do much more if your team consists of 3+ developers/coders.

I tend to use Uniform Server (http://www.uniformserver.com) as my environment. It’s a simple download you unzip and click a “start” executable. Yes, this is a Windows solution however, there are a number of alternative solutions, just search for LAMP on google.

It runs Apache, mySQL and PHP with a number of utilities. The great part is it’s less then 2GB so it fits on a flash drive, this means you can work on any windows, anywhere.

I use that to develop on my local machine. Once I am ready, I ftp my changed files to the site. (After making the database changes)

Every so often I will download the entire site from production and over write my development file. This helps keep my local version from getting to far from the production version.