The opportunities out there for becoming a game designer all on one’s own are pretty numerous in this day and age. You’ve got Flash ActionScript becoming more and more powerful and user friendly, a burgeoning market for casual and indie games, and what I’m most excited about, access to genuine SDK’s for popular contemporary consumer electronics. Since I don’t have an iPhone or iPod Touch, I’ve set my game developing sights on Microsoft’s XBOX 360. Bought me some XNA books and have been diligently plugging away at it.
The book, Aaron Reed’s Learning XNA 3.0, has been really helpful. It’s shown me the basics of user input polling, collision detection, and movement. I’ve never used C# before, but another thing I’ve discovered is that I have a pretty good sense for programming that seems to carry over to XNA, even though I don’t know the language. Plus, the XNA libraries are so convenient to have. I finally feel like I’m programming in a real world setting where I don’t need to write all of these low-level functions and such because there are people who have done it for me, and I can just use them.
At first, I was pretty skeptical of my ability to really get anything running with the XNA tools. After all, I haven’t programmed since college, didn’t ever end up getting that CS degree, and the first time I tried to install Game Studio Express didn’t turn out so well. (Yeah, I couldn’t figure out how to run it. It was sad.) This time, I’ve actually gotten into the program and gotten things on the screen to move around with the gamepad, keyboard, or mouse, animated sprites, and it all only took me a few hours. I even added rumble support. The last couple of days have been pretty exciting.
So, what happens now? Well, the plan is to get a simple game out as quickly as possible, just something for me to play, so I have something to show for all of my studying, and I don’t get discouraged by the process. After that, maybe a larger project. Who knows? Maybe you’ll be seeing it on Xbox Live. I’ll keep you all posted.
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