A Beginning

Things have to start somewhere and this seems like a good place. I'm creating this blog to track my progress developing XNA games for the Xbox 360.

A little background on myself for those just dropping by. I began programming when I was eight, in basic on my old TRS-80 Model I. I spent many hours and sleepovers typing hundreds of lines of code from books and magazines just to get to play tic-tac-toe or mine sweeper. I was inspired by games like Wizardry, Bard's Tale, and a slew of Scott Adams adventure games (the ones with the verb/noun commands) and I was determined to become a game programmer. However, that quest ended sometime around high school when I was told you had to be really good in math to be a programmer. Even though I'd gotten straight "A's" in all my programming classes (up through Pascal), I was having serious trouble with basic algebra. Anyhow, one thing led to another and I abandoned my programming quest for an artistic one.

Fast forward 30 or so years and somehow I've managed to end up as "Senior Game Designer" for a casual/advergaming company called Blockdot. I put the title in quotes because that's not exactly an accurate description of my job. It's much more on the art side of things than the game design side.

In any case, although I never professionally took the developer route, I never completely gave dropped the ball on it either. I've managed to piece together games with Director, Flash, 3d GameStudio and a few other tools. And when I heard Microsoft was going to allow development of games for the Xbox 360 I knew I'd found my next new toy.

So here we are. I've ran a few proof of concept project with XNA Studio 2.0 but so far nothing has been approached as a complete project. It's all been more of a "where do I start" type of experiments.

So, let's get started.