#1GAM

Setter Icon

    Last year, I came across a post on a forum about something called One Game a Month. With uncharacteristic reckless abandon, I decided to jump in and go for it.  Since the most difficult aspect of programming video games for me has so far been keeping the scope reasonable, I came to the conclusion that starting off the year with a Tetris clone written in XNA (what I am most comfortable with) would be the best way to start.

    Since I've started, I've decided to call my project "Setter".  After first thinking about siTter (woo anagrams), then Sitter, then finally realizing that since one of my functions was called "SettleBlocks", and Setter makes more sense logically for a Tetris game, I went with that.  I'll post another entry with a link to the download page on my site for it in a later post.  Lastly, most of the games I'll be doing for this challenge will be open source/public domain, and Setter will be the first.

A Proper Introduction

What is this?

I'm creating a game with a group of people.  In addition, I'm doing the One Game a Month challenge.  No final name as of yet for the game (the prototype name is "Innocence", which seems likely to stick), but I tend to think of it as an action-adventure game meets old school Final Fantasy + Golden Sun + Chrono Trigger.  Grid-based movement a la Final Fantasy, with abilities that can affect the world a la Golden Sun, with a seamless battle system a la Chrono Trigger.

Who am I?

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My name is Ben.  I'm a college graduate with a degree in Computer Science and a love for video games and programming.  Currently, I'm programming this by myself, with a dedicated designer, a dedicated artist, and a dedicated composer all working on the game (none of the art or music has made it in, yet, though).  All current artwork is either extraordinarily basic programmer art (I am decidedly not an artist) or was taken from the Free Pixel Project on squidi.net.

What are you using to make the game?

I'm using C#/XNA for the game engine and tools.  Everything has been written from scratch.  All maps/enemies/objects are being stored in XML, with the intent of making this game very extensible.

For the One Game a Month games, I've started with C#/XNA, but I'm almost certainly going to branch out into other development environments to try to get more practice working with other languages and platforms.  I'm almost certainly going to try to use Unity for one of them.

So what is the intent in having a blog?

I've often seen many game projects, mainly indie game developers, have their own blog to work out their thoughts on various topics/ideas that they have.  It's also a good place to leave information about obstacles you ran across while programming, to help other people who are struggling with the same problem.  I'd also like to have a record of what I did while working on this project for my own personal reflection afterward, should it be necessary.

So what do you have so far?

So far, the project consists of well over 30,000 lines of code, although I've been working a few hours here and there on it over the past year.