A month ago, I was planning on entering the Game Developer for a Day 5 Contest. But then I decided that I would better off if I spend my holiday break expanding my programming knowledge so I can start developing my own game, instead of writing down my ideas of a game for a contest. Afterall, I do want to become a Game Designer.

I started off 2 weeks ago when I finished my fall term (toughest term I ever took). With 6 weeks of no school, it was the perfect opportunity for me to spend my free time learning how to program games. Thus I decided to go with XNA which pretty much is the easiest game development tool out there and it allows you to make games for both the Xbox 360 and the PC. It's fairly new too. Microsoft just released 10 days ago (Dec. 11th).

So thanks to the amazing and helpful XNA community I was able to learn how to use XNA pretty quickly with the many helpful tutorials (including video tutorials). So this is how far I have gotten in 2 weeks of programming on XNA:

Animtation

In this program, I have added a cheap background with an image of the sun moving slowly from left to right. The main animation is of the warrior with the sword where he just swings sword continously forever and ever. Here is the sprite I made for this animation:

As you can see, it's only one image in which I have to write some code that will cut out a piece of that image and display it on screen and do that continously through out the 9 frames of that image. It was a little complicating to program, but with a little help of a video turtorial, I managed to learn with ease.

3D Air Hockey Game

This was pretty darn complicating. This game was completely developed with the help of a series of tutorials. The tutorials provided me with three models (puck, peddle, and the table) and of course a guide to programming a 3D Air Hocky game (Artificial Inteligence not included). I think I spend 3 days on it and it is pretty complicating, but not as complicating as I thought it would be. It's still incomplete though, but my focus is on 2D programming right now, maybe next year I will dwell deeper into 3D programming and perhaps even game Engine development. But for now, I want to take it one step at a time and don't get too ahead of myself.

Collision Detection

In this program, I have developed two 2D bouncing balls. I programmed them so that they keep a constant speed and never slow down. The trick here is to detect when they hit something and how to make them bounce off in the right direction (they don't bounce of magically you know). The easy part was to detecting the outer edges of window and bounce off from there. The really really hard part was detecting when the two balls hit each other and than determining in what direction they would bounce off to.

I spent 5 days on this program. The thing that makes it so hard is that the two balls can hit each from many different angles, and bounce off in many different direction. And I am proud to say that I got it working 95% percent of time. There are certain rare cases where the two balls hit each other at a certain angle while going in a certain direction, in which they end up bouncing off in directions they are not supposed to. In order to get it to work perfectly I am going to have to learn a bunch of physics. So decided to stop there, and be happy with what I managed to develope so far. In future, I might just take a Physics course so that might help me perfect this program.

A lot more to Learn

I still have a lot more to learn like player Input, different kinds of collision tests, Artificial Inteligence, etc. So far I have been enjoying programming with XNA and with 4 more weeks to go, I will have enough time to fully learn the process of 2D game programming and start developing my highly hyped game , The Farthest Land.