A humble suggestion from someone with 10+ years programming experience and as someone who use to teach programming at the college level: you are biting off much more than you can chew. You will spend at least 100 hours of your life on this. Is it really worth it?
But, if your insane, oops, I meant game, I would recommend this:
1. Pick an easy development environment. This would either be VisualBasic or Delphi. I would not recommend any of the C-based languages or Java, those are not meant for beginners.
2. I wouldn't do WOF as your first game. Think of all of the things you have to keep track of: reading in the puzzle, displaying the puzzle, spinning a wheel, what to do if the wheel lands on a special space, what if the letter isn't in the puzzle, what if I want to buy a vowel, how do I know if there are no vowels left, how do I keep score, etc. Try something simple, like the Tic-Tac-Dough bonus game or a simple Price is Right pricing game like Lucky 7 or One Away. You have a lot fewer things to administer, and you can use those experiences to make your WOF experience much less painful. But, if you insist:
3. Break this project into steps. Everybody's first few programming attempts are crap. You may want to start out with developing a hangman program first, which WOF is once you strip away the wheel. That will be challenging enough for you.
4. You probably are not going to be able to have an animated wheel. Animation is the hardest thing in Windows programming.
5. Worry about the sound last. Get the game correct first. You are going to go through hundreds of iterations on making something work right. You are not going to want to hear the theme every time you have to test something. You will go insane (or even more insane than you are now).
I've coded over thirty small game show simulations for my
Game Show Round, and these don't include many of the bells and whistles since it's pretty much presentation software and not meant as a stand alone game. Some I've been able to make in as little as an hour. Some have taken dozens of hours. And I've been doing this for a long, long time.
--Mike
