Well as I posted before I have had a bit more spare time lately – and with it I have been playing some new games (Uncharted 2 is a beauty, and starting to get into Borderlands) but also playing around with XNA still – I just can’t seem to let the dream die I guess. Last time I played around with XNA i created a pretty basic game of Solitaire. Nothing to write home about really, but it was a fun little adventure. I never got to the point I would have gone out and distributed it on Xbox Live or anything, but I somewhat considered it. Ironically before I ever got that far, I was stopped dead in my tracks, granted there was nothing stopping me from continuing to release my game even though there had just been a Solitaire game added to the marketplace, I mean just look at how many vibrator….er Massage games there are out there, but I would rather build something unique that wasn’t all ready available – if at all possible.
I had a few more ideas, and I started to notice a bit of a pattern. I started a project similar to Battleship – not long after came this, I thought of making a card battle type game something like pokemon, magic etc – and then this came out. I thought of making some sort of pumpkin carving game for halloween – and quite of few of those popped up. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think these are ground breaking nobody could think of it ideas or anything, it was just somewhat comical the track record I was having. Finally I thought of something that I thought was somewhat unique and a little less likely to be released before I could get to it, a gunner where you play with both thumbsticks each thumb controlling a different ship. I cant find the article now, but sure enough two guys where working on the same kind of game and had a news story about it. Finally I saw the videos of the Dream Build Play contest this year, and my jaw dropped, it’s unlikely I could ever compete with some of those awesome looking games – and yet I still carry the torch continuing to dabble – and who knows maybe one day actually release a game for you all to play. If anyone is an artist the chances of that might get higher because I pretty much suck anything artistic or design 
For the past month or so I picked up a new project, another one that probably wont ever get to the point of distribution, but just to keep my appetite wet, and my skills at least somewhat sharp in the XNA world. I started recreating a board game that I used to playe quite a bit as a child ‘Stratego’. Again not being graphically inclined at all, i started with what I did know – code, numbers, and logic, and the results of that is the image you see here, the beginning stages of my game. Maybe not the most logical way to start the game, as I am no game developer to say the least – but it worked so I went with it.
The most interesting thing about this image is – in this state the game was 100% playable. The rules were enforce -pieces could only move the places they were allowed to move, when two pieces touched the winner of the battle would stay, the loser would leave – and you could even win by getting your enemy’s flag. Not much to look at, and no AI at all, but functional.
Over time I have continued to tweak that starting point, throw some graphics on it, build an AI engine (to which I have to admit I had not a single clue how I was going to approach such a thing when i decided to tackle that task), and make things like pieces actually moving instead of a square changing from one piece to another. I have tweaked it a few times for performance, not that it was performing badly but I found that if I changed up a few lines of code, I could get it to perform even better, etc. In any event for those of you interested, here is a little screen capture video of the game in its current state.
Be warned, I know its not perfect, amazing, ground breaking, or any of those things – so dont bother clicking play if you are expecting to be amazed
I don’t know if I would call the game complete, I don’t know if I will ever complete it – however it definitely is the furthest along I have gotten when playing around with building a game completely from scratch to date. As I sit here I can continue to name things I could add to it – like make the AI MUCH better (its functional but pretty dumb at this point -but to be fair it did beat me a few times so far), fix up a few nuisance type bugs, add some sort of scoring mechanism, update it to be a 2 player networkable game….and on, and on….and on. Will I ever do those things? Perhaps, because its been a fun time thus far, or I might migrate onto one of those other projects I have in mind (that so far have not been released) and use what I have learned in this adventure towards the next.
