Sorry, this first post is going to be about as interesting as that story your grandma told you at Thanksgiving dinner about catching the clap from that cute Navy guy on shore leave a week earlier. Yeah, I threw up in my mouth too when I heard the disturbing tale... but I'm already veering way off course here.
I've been avidly playing video games since my parents bought an Atari 2600 back in the Christmas of 1983. My father and I stayed up so late that first night playing rounds of Pac-Man on that magical POS known as the Atari 2600. At that point I was completely sold on video games. When I got into high school I took some programming classes and all the math and science courses I could. After graduating I went to the University of Fairbanks Alaska for programming. After a few years of taking programming classes and only being taught how to create my umpteenth massive relational database my excitement about programming had waned and I left Fairbanks.
Now almost 10 years later I hit a tipping point in my life. To make things simple we'll call it a pre-mid-life-crisis. I turned 30 this year and had 3 people very close to me die in the six weeks leading up to my 30th birthday. Turning 30 can be a mind fuck for a lot of people, but add onto that three people you are close to dieing and it made me become very, very introspective. You all know the standard rhetoric that creeps into your brain, "what am I doing with my life", "am I happy", "what is important to me", "If I could do anything I wanted what would it be?". So I began mulling over all my questions and one of the things that kept coming up was making video games.
Problem solving and puzzles have always been things I've loved and making a video game was the entire reason I took up Computer Science in college. I have a huge notebook that over the years I've filled with ideas and concepts as well as certain play mechanics and lots of physics equations. There's even a few notebooks where I fleshed out entire games including notes on A.I. and the intricacies of the play mechanics and the games various subsystems. So for about the past six months or so I've been hammering away on C# in the
XNA framework. C# is the language that Microsoft choose to use for their XNA initiative which is a really nifty program. The idea was that average joe's (who knew a little programming) could use XNA to make games that are playable on the Xbox 360. So now I'm at the point where I've gone through most of their tutorials muddled around in the code base by myself for a while and now feel competent enough to try and begin building my first game from scratch in the XNA environment. Which leads me back to this blog on Destructoid. I'm saying right now that my first game is going to be complete ass. Rarely does anyone try to create something from scratch for the first time and end up with the Mona Lisa. The first game will be a learning process as well as a proof of concept where I can fill in the gaps of knowledge that I have in dealing with rendering graphics in a programming language and the pitfalls of trying to create A.I. and in game physics in C# which is a managed memory environment.
I plan to use this blog to talk about ideas and problems I'm having while coding my first game. I'll also be covering any news that deals with XNA. I'll be adding graphics and setting up this blog over the next week. So to anyone that stumbled upon this post and somehow managed to keep reading 'till this point thanks, and expect to start seeing regular updates here soon.
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Nice man, sounds like it's going to be fun. If you want to save on the A.I. make the game a point and click adventure. Everything's linear.
Sounds cool, I code as well and was wanting to look into the possibility of delving into wii-ware. I'd love to bounce ideas and code off each other if you were interested.
If you ever need any help with anything I would be more than happy to help because I am on a computer game programming course and know a few people who have been messing around with XNA since it came out. Also, if you need anyone to test it, again, I can help because we have a two XNA enabled 360s in our gamelab. I look forward to reading more from you
I'm looking to make games as well, though all I can do is thecharacter design, art design, level design, gameplay design, graphics crafting side of things.
If you guys want to get together and make something, I've got tons of ideas, and a a few thousand dollars to mess around with.
Awesome, thanks for the comments and offers. I'm still trying to decide on a style of game to make for my first real attempt at crafting a game. I was thinking about the difficulties that I would be running into. So I was thinking about making a side scroller shooter in the vein of R-Type or Gradius. It would definitely simplify some of parts of the game design. Although the really difficult part is going to be trying to implement some of my ideas.
One of the things I've been bouncing around is how to implement music that feels interactive with the game. Sort of like a cross between the adaptive audio of the SSX games, but also if each ship was set up kind of like a visualization you would use in most of the popular music players now days. So if ships were pulsing to the beat then that leads into the idea of pulling values from the music for creating the ships paths as they come on screen. This angle would be especially cool if I could get it to work with people's own MP3's. Meaning that each song would sort of randomize the way the ships would act and approach you. As far as I know XNA doesn't seem to have very robust audio library so it would take building my own library of code for that part of the project. Although the more I think about it the more I really want music to be a big factor in it.
Excremento Stunna: Point and click adventure games are awesome, but art is one of my weaker points and a good point and click usually pretty art resource heavy. On top of that I haven't played a good point and click game in years. I think the last one I played was Sam & Max on my old 486dx.
smackfilia: I'll have to look into the Wii-ware I've only heard a little bit about it and haven't really the foggiest about what kind of codebase it works off of.
bunnyrabbit2: Thanks for the offer, but things are so early on at this point that I don't even know where I really need help at. As I get further into the game I'll be interested in hitting you up for trying out the games on your XNA enabled 360's. I haven't paid the extra yet to enable my 360 for XNA, but I probably will be taking care of that in the next few weeks.
Tron Knotts: Seeing as how this is my first attempt at making a game since college I plan on trying to accomplish this without investing much money in it. This first game is going to be about being able to create all the parts of the game and then being able to use that as a demo to try and get some people on board for the 2nd game.
Anyways, thanks for all the input I think I'm gonna go photoshop up a header for this blog and then get cracking on some code for the rest the evening... Thanks Again
Good luck brother. We'll be watching.