P.S. anonymous reader: you don't know what you are getting yourself into. I wish you luck, but honestly unless the exercise is academic, at least use Monogame (http://www.monogame.net/) if not a real, fully integrated, third-party engine. Seriously, then you will actually get to do game programming and game design.

My advice, as a professional game developer, is "don't write code unless you need to."

If you must write C# you should take a look at Unity, but honestly you would be remiss if you overlooked Unreal 4. It is the newest version of the Unreal Engine, and it includes most of the most important features of a game; behavior trees, navigation, user interface, physically-based rendering, animation state machines, multiplayer replication, etc. You can do most of what you want to in Blueprint (a visual scripting language), and if you really need to, you can edit the source code (the license is a full-source license) and make what enhancements you need in C++.

Writing most of this shit from scratch will take you years, just get down to the actual MAKING of the game, and use someone else's engine. The terms are fair ($20/mo, 5% gross revenue for PC platforms and mobile), and the engine is extremely well curated.

www.play.net/gs4 -- 30 day free trial, this is the best MMO ever created.

http://www.flashdevelop.org/ + http://www.flixel.org/

...that Disney deserves.

inb4 skynet

..until I can paste images into it, and paste into lists. I hate to say this, but Microsoft Outlook 2007's compose email is pretty much what I am looking for =)

http://www.nme.io/ cross compiles to most desktop and mobile platforms and has additional features like UDP sockets.

..it's still awesome!

Life is pain. My five-year-old doesn't even cry anymore when she gets her shots -- she is brave as hell -- and when we are done, we go get ice cream. I can see this as good for preventing infection at the site of the vaccination, but shots aren't that bad once you get used to them.

So I guess Gmail, Facebook, and Twitter aren't large scale enterprise deployments?

Linear algebra, matrix math, and set theory are pretty much pre-requisites to any serious graphics implementations, not to mention physics engines. Sorry to go anecdotal, but my web/art background prepared me for making models but certainly not rendering/shading them.

...and to be clear, I don't mean "game design."

Any creative math major can be a game developer with some CS. Education masters? Serious games: http://www.gameslearningsociety.org/

The most basic user story:

1. go to www.google.com.
2. search.

is really how people are getting shit done. I can see niche search, like Wolfram, or maps.google.com, or Amazon for products, but social search is bs.

...so long as they tax violent movies and television first.