Creating a Game Part 1

I've decided to write a series of posts about creating a game using the .net platform. Why do this? because game development has always fascinated me. Also, getting this out in public is motivation to finish something and ship it. That's the most difficult thing to do in software development, is to ship a product. I've read that if you are overweight, a good way to lose weight it to post online your weight each week or so, as you attempt to lose weight. It's great motivation to do so, and I am hoping that this series of posts will motivate me to produce something tangible.

Now that we have the fancy introduction out of the way, its time to get down to business. For this project, I have chosen WPF as my development platform. It seems like a fairly logical choice over something like Silverlight. After doing a lot of research and thinking, I just came to the conclusion that Silverlight is not the perfect fit as a platform for what I wish to do.

So, what kind of game do you plan to write? Well, I plan to create a fishing game. That's right I said fishing game, big whoop, you wanna fight? In all seriousness, its a subject matter that interest me, and I haven't see any games like the kind of game I want to create. The basic premise of the game, is that you control a fishing boat, and you fish on lakes with other people or just by yourself in a single player mode.

So before we can write a single line of code, we probably should do some planning, and decide on what minimum set of features we need in order to release something that works. In the beginning, I am going to focus on the single player part of the game. Below is the things I need to get working first

• Create an image that represents a lake. This will be used to build a map/level of a lake that is fishable
• Take an image that represents a lake, and turn it into a map/level, and save it
• Load a saved map into the app
• Get the boat moving around the map.
• Allow the player to cast for fish.

 I plan to work on the tools to build the levels first, the reason being, is that I plan to add a lot of detail to the maps as we go along, and I want to make it a painless as possible to regenerate new levels as needed.