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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.

So those of you that read along on my humble little blog know – I haved toyed around with XNA off and on for a bit now – and I actually finished a rough cut of a fully functional game.  Granted it wasn’t much to play with but truth be told my intent was to use it to learn, expand it from a single solitaire game to a group of solitaire games (like a selection fo 10 or so), with a ‘career stat’ type tracking for each of the game types.  So you would be able to look at things like your fastest completion time, your completion percentage, your wins versus losses, and who knows what else. Here and there over the past few weeks or so I did completely rework alot of the guts of the game to make it easier to add these to be built various solitaire game types, reviewed rules of a bunch of common solitaire game types,  and I completely reworked the user interface to allow mouse, or xbox controller to navigate the cards, but still had quite a bit to go.

So I was looking over my code for the game, deciding if I wanted to pick up some game coding tonight or if I wanted to actually play some games, and playing games won.  Since I haven’t really been on my xbox for long in the last few days I decided to browse the marketplace – the arcades and the community games….and what did I find?  Indirian Solitaire.  That’s right folks it just so happens the game I was planning to build and release was just put on the marketplace today.  Don’t get me wrong I am not saying they stole my code – or my idea, let’s be honest a solitaire game isn’t exactly ground breaking – but on the flip side, can I really continue to develop and release a game with pretty much the same features that this game provides?  The only thing that I was originally planning to include that they don’t have in their game was those career stats I mentioned.  It’s not the same as working on something like a RPG, or a platformer, which even if you have a similar character or story – there are varients to make it unique on its own – a grouping of card games is a grouping of card games, and even if i selected 10 different solitaire types, it just seems to cross or border on that to much of the same thing line.

So now comes the time where I decide where to go next.  Do I:

• Continue to develop the game as I originally intended if for nothing else to extend my knowledge, most likely not complete the entire process of submitting it as a full XNA game for the marketplace
• Morph it into a new idea – one of which Trapper has discussed with me somewhat related to a solitaire setup
• Scrap it and just hope that I can forge and execute my next idea before someone else gets the jump on me again?

In reality I had a feeling it was bound to happen as I was just getting my feet wet in game development at all and as stated above it wasn’t some completely new ground breaking IP that I came up with on my own destined to rise to the top of the community games world, but it still was a bit of a saddening blow to see exactly what I seriously considering releasing as an XNA game show up on the marketplace – and moments before I was planning on spending some time on that very project.

So I have always had this dream/desire/hope/wish to be a game developer, will I ever get there?  Who knows….making something as serious as Gears of War 2 – very unlikely, but who knows maybe one day I’ll have something interesting for people to play with.  Either way, I pretty much live and breath code in about any language I can get my hands on – so I am enjoying the ride either way.

After playing around with creators club, reviewing some tutorials, guides and forum threads I decided to give building a game from scratch a shot.  My selection was not perhaps the most interesting of games, I mean everyone has solitaire on the computer all ready – but I figured a card game could be a nice starting point.

Being my first attempt, I might have not done things in the most logical or useful way – but its functional, and I expect the knowledge to grow as time goes on.  As I sit here looking at the final working product I am rather amazed at what is involved in something as simple as creating a game of solitaire.  I say final working product, but in reality it isn’t final. As I sit here and took a few screen shots for this posting I all ready spotted a small glitch that I want to fix – and all ready thinking of more things I could add.

It’s actually a pretty interesting process, one that seems to never be finished.   I have a few other game ideas spinning in my head, and I am bugging friends to come up with some better ideas – maybe one day I will come up with something that makes its way to the Community Games.  Perhaps a bit lofty of a goal – but who knows.

So far this is only functional on windows (as I am not ready to commit to paying for an XNA subscription without something perhaps useful enough to share with everyone) and would require the XNA framework to be installed.  Maybe as I have some spare time and continue to work on it I will provide a download link if people actually want such a thing.

For now, how about some screen shots – again very basic but functional (you should have seen it before i made it somewhat pretty!

An update to the XNA Studio was released today officially titled XNA Game Studio Express 1.0 Refresh.

The most significant new feature is the addition of XNA Packager, a utility which will allow users to build and share game binaries for both Windows and Xbox 360. Users can now easily package and share their games for Windows and Xbox 360 without having to share their project source code. The sharing of Xbox 360 games requires a subscription to the XNA Creators Club, which is available via Xbox LIVE Marketplace for $49 (U.S.) for a four-month subscription, or $99 (U.S.) for an annual subscription.

Additional features included in the XNA Game Studio Express 1.0 Refresh include:

• Official XNA Game Studio Express compatibility with Windows Vista
• Support for 3D audio using XACT
• Support for fonts in the XNA Framework
• Various other product enhancements and performance tuning

The free update and a full feature list can be downloaded at http://msdn.com/xna and http://creators.xna.com.

So the more I think about XNA the more I start to get really interested in developing a game, perhaps for the contest perhaps just for friends, I really don’t know – but its on my mind lately. The problem at hand is I have yet to come up with an actual game idea to work with, I had a few ideas, but nothing that has really got me thinking it would be worth the effort – or anyone would even want to play it. The fact that my C# and graphical experience is somewhat limited probably doesnt help either, clearly I am fighting an uphill battle BUT if anyone else that is interested in developing a XNA game and is looking for a partner, get a hold of me. Sure its a long shot, but maybe one of you loyal readers will get me off my butt and put something together