It was always a matter of time before my addiction to games and my addiction to programming eventually collided in a horrible mistake.

I’ve decided to start writing a game, using a home grown game engine hopefully with “a little help from my friends”.

I won’t spoil anything too much (as I don’t really want to play my hand too early) but the gist is a 2d, top down, multiplayer action game, with heavy RPG tendencies.  Think of it as a cross between 2d Zelda games, Cannon Fodder and high end raiding in World of Warcraft.  The game design is up in the air at the moment, but hopefully it’ll be derived from a system my good friend Matt has started fleshing out (with the potential for a more RPG leaned game mode, and a more arcade oriented game mode).

The only problem is, I’ve never attempted to write a game before.

So hopefully we can learn together.  I have a rough hit-list of the ground I’m going to have to cover to pull this off, and a rough idea of the technology involved (partially from my other programming pursuits, partially from my enthusiastic following of the games industry) but actually implementing it from the ground up is going to prove an entertaining learning experience.

I’ll tag these posts so people can avoid or watch them at their leisure- there’s a good chance I’ll be dropping into lots of technical detail with complete disregard for the experience levels of my audience. That said, I’m going to be learning a lot of this stuff from scratch (collision detection, graphics rendering, effective ways to script games) while dragging in my bread and butter (distributed systems, C#, etc) to hopefully fill in around the edges.

I’m going to be working in the XNA framework, partially to lower my barrier to entry (seeing as .Net is the day-job and the hobby) and partially because I enjoy the ability to target both the PC and the Xbox360 platform using roughly the same code.

It’s going to be a rocky ride I’m sure, I’ve been working on proof-of-concept code for about a week on and off and it looks like it’s something you can stumble in to (especially with some of the fantastic guides available online).  I’m more than willing to take pointers or tips, so if anyone knows of any especially trustworthy resources on authoring 2d games I’d love to hear some suggestions.