About the Project...

I've always developed games as a hobby since I was a kid. I started with text-based games in QBASIC when I was about 7. Since then I've made shooters, puzzle games, tools and other stuff for my own amusement and the amusement of my friends in school. When I found out we had to do a large software project over eight months in our last year of school I immediately wanted to do a game.

The project, currently untitled, is a space combat simulator game in the same vein as the Freespace series and X-Wing series of games. The game is planned to be set up something like Quake 3 with one player hosting a game session and other players joining. Game types would be free for all (deathmatch, keep-away etc.) and team-vs-team (capital ship assault, etc.)

At this point I've finished enough of the initial planning and school-related junk that I can actually start development. I'm using XNA Game Studio 3.1 foras a development framework for the project. This provides a nice multi-platform base to work from and a good collection of documentation and sample code to boot. I'm mulling over using an existing graphics engine or rolling my own at the moment.

There seems to be a decent selection of graphics engines aimed at the XNA environment out there however most of the ones I've looked at are specifically aimed at rendering terrains which isn't particularly helpful. I've narrowed my list down to TXNA and Nuclex. My choice now comes down to how easily I can exploit the engine for my vile purposes and, if I can't whether it'd be easier to tear the engine apart or code what I need as I need it.

I'll be making my decision later this week.

About Me...

Hi, I'm a college student currently in the final year of my program at Conestoga College. One of the tasks we have to complete in order to graduate the program is to complete a software systems project over the next two semesters. For my project I chose to develop a multi-player action game on the XNA platform.

This blog will be about the various challenges that I encounter during the development of my game project. This includes coding issues, sceenshots, school-related crap and anything else I feel like blogging about. I intend to make a post on this blog at least once a week.


Besides this blog I'm also an occasional poster on the XNA community under the name "Dan Dan Dan Dan"