johng Blog

I’ve always had this urge to make games, it’s something that dates back to my old Spectrum ZX days and the programs you could write in basic and record to tape. Since then I dipped into ‘Click ‘n’ Play’ from which the seminal Helicopter Attack Trilogy was born, a series only seen by a few individuals for a good reason - goofy humour, tons of inside jokes and cheesy midi music (yeh!). Someday I’m sure I’ll find that game again, it’s probably on a CD or floppy somewhere.

Moving closer to the present day I looked into C++ with DirectX and OpenGL, all of which seemed overly complex for what I wanted to achieve. Windows programming in C++ is just plain dumb, there’s no logic to the code you write, you feel like your repeating yourself and most of the API names are meaningless.

So after much dipping in and out over the past few years it seems like a solution has arrived that I can actually get something done with in a relatively short period of time. XNA Game Studios Express is now on its second beta and has become a really powerful tool. By providing the framework needed to handle the game (the game loop, controller support, etc) I can concentrate on actually deciding how high my stick man can jump. Over the weekend I was able to quickly put together the aforementioned stick man giving him the ability to run around and shoot fireballs.

It’s great to see managed code finally make its way into the game world, sure, people have been making games in Java for years but it always seemed so wrong on so many levels. With XNA you have the power of DirectX without all the C++ crap that usually goes with it.

Hopefully I will have my first prototype done this weekend. It’s a nice change to say that.