It's almost a cliche, Hello World!

Hello folks,

I'd like to start writing outright.

Introduction

To keep it short and simple. I'm a student, XNA enthusiast (or whatever else is good for developing games) and I consider myself a hardcore gamer. I can't say I played all the games out there, still I play lot.

This brings me to the next point, my motivation. There are actally two types of games I prefer. The first are simply games, where you get the feeling of playing a movie or a story. Best examples are Heavy Rain, Fahrenheit, Uncharted (God I love Unchrted, several playthroughs in every sequel on highest difficulty setting. I still don't get enough of it) and others. Also in FPS games like Crysis 2 and all Half-Life games you constantly have the feeling of being part of a big Motion Picture which you can control.

The second type and this is actually my favorite, are RPG games. Just to name some of my favorite titles Baldur's Gate, Arcanum, Dragon Age, Mass Effect, Elder's Scroll, Fallout, Diablo....well mainly everthing coming from Bioware and old Studios like Black Isle.

My dream always was to create a game like "Baldur's Gate" or "Fallout". So here I am. But this is clearly not a job for one man. This is why I don't have any big expectations like finishing the game in a certain time period. So my entire project is about two things that are very important to me. First it is about fulfilling my personal dream of creating a game similar to those great old titles named above and newer games like "Dragon Age". The second important aspect is the learning process. I mean if you are working on a project you always learn a lot. This is why any help, advice and constructive critisism is always welcome, no matter if it is on the concept I am creating, technological aspect of my project or even this journal.

So in order to start, the first thing I did was to read some books on 2D-programming. After I got an idea on how XNA works I started right away by implementing my own, simple 2D-games. I didn't finish any of them. But it wasn't my intention to create some polished complete game. My goal was to experiment a little and to see what I was capable of doing in XNA. Below you can see the results:

In this video I tried to implement a little game based on an artwork I stumbeled over on the WWW. I like it and I really enjoyed writing it. The only thing that bothers me is that I could have done the angle calculation a little better. What I learned from this project was mainly how to handle data in a grid, because all the squares that represent the lung are stored in a grid.

In my next project I implemented a little Quiz game. It is in german and I didn't add enough questions, so some of them are repeated pretty often. But what I learned here was, how to write and read XML-files in XNA. All questions and awnsers are stored in XML, this makes creating content much easier.

As I am also a passionate backgammon player, my next project was about implementing the basic functionalities of a backgammon board.

After all that I started to get into 3D-programming. This brings me to my next project. This time I plan to keep working on it for a very long time. Summarily I can tell you that it is going to be a isometric view rpg.

So what to expect from my journal? Right now I already started with drafts of characters, levels and the story which I will share with you soon. Besides I also started to develop a basic map editor for my game. So basically I will share every update on my Project, whether it is game content or developing issues.
In my next entry I want to talk about the basic gameplay system I am developing for the game (pen and paper right now).

Like I said before my primary goal in this project is to learn about game development as much as possible. That is why any advice is welcome, also on the journal itself.
I hope you are looking forward for the next journal entry as much as I do.

Greets Plusnoir.

P.S.: As I am only a beginner I would be very happy about any comment on my journal. Tell me what you think. You would make me happy ;)