NorfolkNChance

Whilst being a professional game developer I do a little game programming of my own at home.
Back when I was at Uni I started on the Net Yaroze PlayStation Development Kit as my first console based project. I hacked a sample from the websites tutorials and made a homage to Pac Man, unfortunately I never released the game as I never got the game into a final release condition.

Post Net Yaroze I looked to Direct X as the platform of choice, I think I must have started writing some sample code from Direct X 7, DX8, DX9 and quite possibly DX 10. I would have to check my archives to confirm. As you can guess I always started something but never quite got anywhere with it.

That all changed with XNA and the Xbox 360 Creators Club. I made some pretty decent progress with two games, but they too have yet to get finalised. The one bonus about XNA I have found is the ability to get a working game title up and running with some basic functionality in quite a short time.

For example, one Saturday evening I decided I would park my first project BlasterXNA and work on a simple static screen shooter based on the premise of honey bees and hornets (seeking my inspiration from a BBC news article on how Honey Bees swarm together to suffocate an attacking Hornet with Carbon Dioxide and increased heat). Hence forth, SwarmXNA was born. I was able to take a flocking sample and start molding it into the game I wanted. So within about 3 hours I was realising my game idea, prototyping it with little effort.

This is how I feel game development should be heading, all the technical wizardry should be left to the experts and the gaming experience left to those who want to try out their ideas.

For the future I fully intend to finish off my current game projects, possibly not to my final idea but suitable enough to release out there in the wild. My next idea is to work collaboratively on something small, quick to turnaround - I see it as a challenge to produce work of a sufficient quality that another can work with it. The end goal is seeing something new get made and put out their to play.

In essence, making the games I want to play myself.