Since I was a kid I have always been into computer games. It all started with my Atari 2800, then onto the NES, Sega MegaDrive, SNES, N64, Xbox, and now Xbox 360 and Nintendo Wii, plus the odd bit of PC gaming along the way. Only during college I got a taste at some simple game design and programming and I have been meaning to get into it ever since. The picture on the right is a screen shot of a flash game I made in 4th year with Trish and another programmer plus two digital artists. The game was entitled ‘The Cloning’!

I have decided to get into game development as a hobby and what better way to start than try and get into Microsoft XNA. The nerdy rundown speil: “Microsoft XNA is a set of tools, complete with a managed runtime environment, provided by Microsoft, that facilitates computer game design, development, and management. XNA does this by freeing game designers from writing “repetitive boilerplate code”, and brings all aspects of game production into a single system.”

I’ll start by downloading the XNA development platform and I’ll try and look through some of the examples, tweaking around with some of the code. I have never programmed in .NET before so it might take me a while to get into it. But if its as simple as microsoft say it is I might be able to get my head around it. My housemate Ali also shares an interest in this so we’re going to try and combine both our efforts and design a game over the summer.

Rome wasn’t built in a day and I hope we’ll stick with it. Hopefully,we’ll have a simple game up and running that we can deploy on my Xbox 360 at the end of the summer :)

Let the nerding commence