I’m a developer, I play games and I’ve had a podcast for the last three years talking about games but I’ve never actually managed to make a game before. There’s nothing stopping me do it: I have the skills, I have the ideas and I have the talent (I believe) but I have the killer weakness of getting easily distracted.
Along the way I’ve also gotten out of the habit of coding in my spare time. I used to spend a lot of (enjoyable) time poking around at the debugging layer of .NET and I feel the need to poke around at something again.
So basically I need to make a game to scratch that itch, but along the way play with a whole range of things that I find interesting. How hard can that be?
To start with I’m going to need a set of achievable goals. I’ve found over the years that the key to getting any software project successfully finished is to work in short steps with a working product at every step. For a game that means having something I can play from day one.
Next I need an idea. Luckily I have one, and it’s something I’ve wanted to explore for a long time. This question needs a console to be answered and so the choice of technology becomes limited to one possible solution: XNA.
What is that question? Can you make a good console RTS game?
