Actually, not a lot - even none if that is the case! This blog series is intended for the casual coder and the hobby game programmer. Of course it helps if you have at least some experience in JavaScript or C, or any language really. And you don't need to be a website developing guru because although this is a web development environment, the amount of actual HTML code that we will be doing is negligible. We just need a simple web page shell or template to house the true game code running inside of it. And since the wonderful Three.js library is written in JavaScript, that will be the main language used.
If you've never used JavaScript before, don't worry: I've found that it is one of the most flexible, stripped-down languages out there. In my programming travels I have used Basic, Pascal, C, C++, Java, and JavaScript. JavaScript was the easiest for me to get going with right away. It doesn't have a lot of constraints and it's nice not to have to deal with topics such as classes and pointer references, which can be really confusing to amateur programmers.
Finally, if you have never hand-coded anything before, you will still be able to follow along with this blog. We will start out by doing what every programming novice does - copy and paste! To get our bearings, we'll look at some basic 3D examples that have already been made. I will walk us through each line. What happens next is the most important: we will tinker with values in other people's code and see what happens. This is basically how I learned back in the 80's - Copy, paste, fiddle, repeat...
After seeing enough examples, pretty soon you will get the feel of what will happen before you change something in the code. When we reach this level, we can start thinking about higher level topics like game design and gameplay.
So, enough exposition. In my next post, we will assemble all the tools together to make a template page for our upcoming game projects!
