The Motivation

Like many brave geeks before me, I want to create computer games. There is a whole generation of programmers like me who cut their teeth on creating XMS boot disks so that they could get X-Wing to run on their home PCs, or who ran over to a friend’s house with an IP address written down on a sticky note to get DOOM up and running over the modem. Games are in our DNA and (contrary to what many pre-videogame agers seem to think should happen) for many of us this love doesn’t die out was we get older. In addition, the creative impulse seems to run pretty strongly in gamers, it seems that a higher percent of video game players want to actually create games, in contrast to the number of movie fans who actually want to create their own movies.

But aside from a brief summer camp at Digipen as a High School student (in which I let all the actually talented coders on my team do all the work) I’ve never actually done any game programming. I’ve always considered the barriers to entry for the C++ / DirectX world to be a little too high for me to take on for just a hobby. But now that technologies like Flash and XNA have arrived it seems like a great time to jump in and try to actually hash out some cute little games.

As the name implies I’m looking to create bite-sized games that don’t require massive time investments and that I can finish to completion. That last part is important to me as I know that many hobbyist programmers peter out after they choose to tackle too advanced a project. I want even my early “hello world” project to be fully “games” as opposed to just tech demos. And I want to plan out one main project and not move on until I’ve completed it to my satisfaction.
With that said my next posting will be starting the basic design of my first cute little game.