Ok I’ve had a bit of change of heart.  I’m going to park the Atari 2600 game for a bit.  Because frankly I was finding it hard to get motivated to do it, hence the radio silence for a few months.  So I’ve decided I’m going to start another project that I am quite excited about.

Ever since I wrote my first game BlackJack in Turbo Pascal 7, I’ve been wanting to write another game.  I’ve got an idea of a game in my head that I want to write called Rotation (more details in later posts).  I’ve decided to write the game using Microsoft’s XNA framework, as I use C# in my day job it makes sense to write a game in a language that I’m comfortable in.

I’ve downloaded XNA framework and setup a git repository on bitbucket.  I have to say that so far I’m really impressed with bitbucket.  They provide a free account and it gives you a really easy way to access your code from anywhere.  As a git user in my day job for 6 months or so now, git was the obvious choice for source control.

I’d like to point out that I’m a business web applications developer by day.  My programming habits come from a world of unit tests and IoC containers.  I’m going to keep mainly to the style I’m used to when I write this game.  I’m pretty sure that a game developer would go about this game in a very different way and optimise for performance not maintainability and test coverage (perhaps I’m doing those guys a disservice but that’s the impression I get).

Next post will explain more about the game and some of my early design decisions.