Business: Innovators Adopters to Late Adopters

gaming: industry later Adopters to laggards.

Although its rare we have a client that is planning to use sliverlight for a major internal application which is something I never saw coming, I consider that very innovative for the business world

Business world: Innovators to Early adopters
Gaming Industry: Late Adopters to laggards

It should be the exact opposite!

I feel very confident that .Net will become a gaming platform standard rather soon in fact with the multi-core coding being abstracted in .Net

I disagree Dazza. When you say “or compatible games” that means PC games. Personally I don’t have an issue with most small shops writing games for Xbox and PC only. The fact that you CAN write for a console is just an advantage on top of the fact you can develop PC games using an excellent framework.

With regard to having no low level audio, xbox controllers etc, there’s no reason you can’t add support for this yourself. C# can call through to native DLL’s/code that does this if needed. I don’t realistically see using XNA as being as limiting as you say.

I’m already well experienced with C++ but just to keep my skillset a little more marketable, I’m attempting to use my project as a way to sit down and finally learn C# for things. I was impressed by the release of Fastcrawl (http://www.pawleyscape.com/fastcrawl/) a 2D RPG which plays just fine for me and the type of game I’m looking at making.

I’m hoping that as Windows Vista slowly permeates itself into the consumer market, it will be less of a problem making sure the necessary .NET components are on your customer’s machine and hopefully things at that point will “just work”. *cross fingers*

Plus “investigative” blogs about .NET packaging in “The Real World” which Doolwind mentions wanting to write about will be very interesting indeed!

I know your pain of convincing people to change up to newer technologies and I’m glad that now I’m in a position to run my own business I can make the decisions and live out the consequences. I’d encourage you to continue to “push the envelope” with those around you and continue to debate with them the advantages of change. I’d also recommend moving on if you find to much conflict as it’s possible to waste your entire life explaining to bad programmers why they should change.

On to your question…..

I’ll tackle your problem with two solutions to solve the different facets of it. Firstly, the way I get around reinventing the wheel and creating a full tool chain is through procedurally generating everything I need. The best way is to take an example:

I’m playing around with a little archery game in XNA at the moment. I’d like a bunch of levels but don’t want to make a level editor. I’m going to get my artist to make a bunch of “blocks” that represent different types of terrain. I’ll also get some different trees and a few pieces of a castle. I then procedurally put these together using a small set of rules to generate an unlimited number of levels for people to play. I did a similar thing with the levels in my 1 day game recently.

The other way I get around this is making the game itself the editor. Have a key combination that brings you into editor mode that lets you simple place or move objects, even in a rudimentary way. I did a similar thing with my RTS, where you clicked a button and could change the height or terrain or add Tiberium* anywhere you want. You could then save out the level and load it in later. This is slightly more work as you are in effect making part of an editor, but its less time than a fully fledged editor.

The second part of your problem I see is the design part. An easy way to do this is to take a common game style and either mix it in with a new style, or take a completely different approach to it. There are a couple of different levels of game design and you need to decide which you want to explore (or both). The first level is the micro decisions that are made. It doesn’t matter what game you are making (even a 2D side scroller) you’ll always get to make these decisions and they can be unique even with a tried and true genre. For example you may make a 2D side-scroller where you control two characters at once, one on each 360 thumbstick.

The second level of design is the macro decisions you make. This is the actual game itself you want to make. I’d recommend that for a tech demo you don’t worry to much about this. It’s extremely hard to come up with a brand new game or genre of game, and you don’t gain a great deal by doing it. I’d say that designers will look more at your micro decisions when hiring a designer. The main reason for this is that you generally don’t get to make the macro decisions when working for a game company. You get given a game to make, and all you can do is make the micro design decisions to mold that overall game into your dream.

I would say though that XNA is a perfect for your needs. If you are looking for more specifics let me know, or if you want to get in touch with a game designer I can hook you up to get more thoughts.

As I’m only 22, the expert label should be taken with a grain of salt, but I feel that the poignancy of a “graduate” being an expert in these specific technologies after 3 years will not be lost on you. For some reason, the previous generation of (business?) software engineers fear “new” or specific technologies irrationally. For my colleagues to avoid learning the intricacies of COM after working on a COM-based product for 5-10 years disgusts me.

So you can imagine the blow-back I received when suggesting that we actively support a migration to the .NET framework (WinForms can replace our monolithic MFC GUI, for example).

So here I am, with 3 years real-world experience (going on 4) and a Software Engineering degree. I’ve not worked on my hobby games for a while (since writing some LUA games for the PSP) and I’m keen to give XNA a go, now that we’re in 2.0. It may not be surprising to hear that I’m considering a change of employment…

What would you suggest I build in XNA as a worthy learning experience & demonstration of my game design (not just coding) skills? I tend to over-engineer my hobby projects, for example:
– I want to make a 2d, side-scrolling platformer
– Ah crap, I need to make a world builder
– Ah crap, I need to make a tool to manage objects in my world
– … etc.

I can whip-up a space invaders clone in a matter of minutes (it’s my “hello world”) but I’d like to attempt something more adventurous. Do you have any suggestions on approaching this from a different angle (say, where I don’t need to reinvent the wheel by creating a fully fledged tool chain for a simple tech demo)?