The blog

Since my last post, the one about game design that included a discussion about using XML, I took another run with Microsoft's XNA studio. In particular the RPG toolkit. Can you guess how it stores all of it's quest, item and character data? Yup. XML. I'm building it at the moment, using the "release" configuration. For science! While waiting I may as well say something useful... ho-hum. ICO is great, though I think I preferred Shadow of the Colossus. When I saw that my counter had reached over 2000 hits I had a look at my stats again. Some interesting ones. I get regular searches through google, and some hits from Wikipedia. My main traffic comes from the Nosgothic Realm, which is fair enough. However, I've also been linked to through a quick-search on Facebook and Google's Orkut beta, which is basically Google's answer to Facebook. It looks a bit interesting. Also, I've gotten hits to the main page without a referring link from someone in Japan us

I like to try and program games in my spare time - I've got a few projects in mind, but they'll all take a long time to make. One of the first tasks would be to try and design an engine for the game, which in turn requires figuring out what classes to use/design and how they should interact. So I'm going to muse upon this here and we'll see what I come up with. The first thing to consider would probably be whether the game is 2D, 3D, or a mix of both. This would greatly influence how characters get displayed - you could have a fully 2D game using sprites like the old Zelda games; You could have a fully 3D game like Half Life, in which everything is a 3D model with a texture on top; Or you could have a game that blends the two - 2D sprites in a 3D environment, 3D models on a 2D plane... those are probably the only two options to be honest. You could even have fully 3D game but viewed from such a perspective that it looks like a 2D game - the most recent Pokemon games see