macOS How hard is it?

[iMacZealot]

I'm interested in how difficult software developing is... I've never written a line of code. Something I'd like to see is a Mac master version of the Lingo game. I'm not sure if you're familiar with it, but it's a game show format that's been very successful in Europe and has been airing here in the United States for a few years now on the Game Show Network. There isn't really much online software for it, and I was wondering if it's feasible for me to learn how to make my own version.

Essentially, the game is surrounded five letter mystery words. The first letter of the word is given, and players spell five letter words, and then their guess is "graded" and any letters in the mystery word are revealed as well as if they're in the right place. A letter in the word and in the right place is colored orange and a letter in the word but out of place is circled yellow. There's also the cool beeping effect with the grading of the guesses, too. When they guess the right word, they also get to draw balls and essentially complete a Bingo card, but I'm more interested in the word part.

Television and broadcasting is my forte, and I'm interested in making my own incarnation of the show.

Here are some clips of the show:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=me-PHrAHqLI (US version, skip to about 1:30 for the actual game)
http://youtube.com/watch?v=4CqolkSRb5E (Dutch version, with 6 letter words, skip to about 2:45)

Am I crazy, or is this totally feasible?

 

[kainjow]

Sounds like a fun game, never heard of it (then again I don't watch TV).

I think this is something that could be used as an assignment in a first-level CS course. It's really just a matter of picking a random word, and then taking user input and determine which characters exist in the random word. Right?

It would be a good project to work on. You could start off by doing it all on the command line in C/C++ (simplest way to start off learning programming), then move on up to a GUI app (Cocoa) and do some fancy stuff with Core Animation

 

[Cromulent]

It really isn't that hard to learn a language. Shouldn't take too long at all.

The hard part is learning APIs (such as Carbon or Cocoa) and then the relevant knowledge that is required (Maths and Physics for games etc) and the implementation, i.e taking an idea and turning it into a program can be quite tricky to find the best solution.

All of that comes with practice. One thing I will say though, never copy and paste code from tutorials. Always type it yourself. If you start a new project type by hand all the basic stuff as well as the new stuff that way you really bang it into your head and you learn faster. Templates are good, but I think they should only be used once you could type the contents pretty much from memory anyway, otherwise they just hinder your learning.

As the above poster said, starting with C on the command line is a good way to get into programming.