My New Project

Having just acquired a shiny new XBox 360, noting the release of XNA Game Studio Express, and being the curious little geek that I am, I have decided to try my hand at writing my first video game.

The Concept

Instead of trying to come up with my own game concept the first (maybe only) time out, I am "borrowing" a concept from someone else. The board game Ra. This is basically a game where you bid on tokens to amass points and crush your enemies in a most humiliating manner. I first played the game at Brian Anzalones house several years ago, and despite my less than .500 average enjoy it. From what I've seen, there is no other game available on XBox quite like this (sorry FPS fans, it's not an "action" game) This choice was also out of practiality; I've never written a game before, and didn't want my first attempt to be saddled with having to learn how to do animation, physics, collision detection, lighting and other stuff in involved in action games.

This is a nice, simple, civilized board game. Just my speed first time out.

The First Feature Set

Being a fan of agile development, I will be creating this game as a series of features to be deployed on an probably very irratic and unpredictable schedule. The goals for my first release are:

• Target for the XBox 360 platform


• All basic rules and scoring in place


• Playable against others via XBox live

Once I get these things working, I'll look into developing an "AI" to facilitate single player games, but being my first game I want to start kinda small.

The first step is going to be setting of the XNA Game Studio on my home machine. It looks like I'll need to pay the $50.00 a month, but hey, knowledge is it's own reward, right....?

I'll be sure to blog about my progress. In the meantime, if you would like to be on my list of "beta testers," send me a comment and if I don't already have your XBox Live ID, be sure to include that.