Saturday, April 30, 2011

Dev Diary

So . . this blog is a chronicle of my attempt to teach myself to make some video games using C# and XNA Game Studio. My background is around five years as a video game QA guy, assistant producer, content designer / scripter, general all-around gofer, etc. I'm familiar enough with the process of making games to give it a go, but I have no formal programming education.

My goal with this project is to create enough cool demos to populate an online game design portfolio. Right now I'm focusing on just basic game mechanics, building a platformer from some tutorial examples I found on the web. I'm already fairly comfortable painting images to the screen, taking some keyboard input, doing some simple animations . . OK the animation code is still a bit beyond me but I've made it work.

I did a Pong clone from a tutorial a couple of weeks ago, and now I'm ready to do a Mario-style platformer, which I'll hopefully be able to customize and tweak more than Pong, and maybe get a handle on how some if this code actually works . . .

I'll try to post screenshots here as I make progress.