So after putting off starting this blog for quite a while now, I’ve decided it is time to do this. I guess the main reason I never really did anything with it before was lack of motivation. I kept asking myself what I would write about or why should I take time out of my increasingly busy schedule to write a bit of drivel, here and there. Well, I’ve been pushing myself into game programming a bit more lately after taking an XNA class and loving it, and decided it’s time I start chronicling my progress and interesting things I run across.

Lately, I’ve been reading a lot of the stuff over on Game Development Stack Exchange in order to figure out where to start when it comes to game development in C++. I’ll start out by saying, I haven’t used C++ in a long time, as I’ve been developing in PHP at work and my latest programming classes have been C# and VB.Net. So, a refresher was in order, along with figuring out where to start. So, I found SDL and started tearing through some game dev specific tutorials and I must say, C++ is coming back to me pretty well. In addition to the SDL tutorials, I’ve been watching the C++ videos over on 3D Buzz, which have also been an immense help in refreshing my knowledge of the language, as well as, helping me to figure out the overall structure of putting a game together from scratch. So far, everything has been great with refreshing and learning.

Although learning C++ game dev has been great and a nice challenge, so far, I may find myself jumping back into XNA for a while. I got a newsletter yesterday reminding me about the Imagine Cup 2011 competition that Microsoft is putting on. I took a look through the game design category and decided it looked like something doable, if I were able to get the right group of creative minds together for my team. I read through the theme and came up with a couple decent ideas right away that I will play around with a bit. After some mind-mapping and discussion with my probable team members last night, I have a few better ideas that just may work out. Stay tuned…