I’ve been doing 2D XNA for about a year and a half now and I feel I’m fairly competent at it, largely due to my experience in the Imagine Cup, so over this past week or so I’ve begun working on my first 3D XNA game. I’ve had the concept for the game in my head and been thinking it through quite a lot and now I feel I am ready to begin some of the core programming. Some time in the future I may give some more details about the project but as I am aiming to get it on the Xbox Live Indie Games, I feel like I should keep quiet for now until I get a substantial amount of work done!
I’ve found the 3D work so far quite enjoyable, I’ve encountered a few strange issues and differences that you wouldn’t come across in a 3D game but that’s all part of the learning curve. I’m putting into practice a lot of the lessons I have learnt from my placement at Microsoft already in terms of class design project structure and hope to create a robust game that I should be able to maintain easily.
I plan on updating this blog as I go along with something similar to a tutorial series and will hopefully be able to fill in some the gaps that are left by some of the “How to…” and “Introduction to…” tutorials.
Something I have played with for a little while is the idea of creating more complex session variables in PHP. I’m sure this kind of thing has been done before so this is probably nothing new to some people. The idea just came into my head a little while back and I decided to give it a go. Basically all I do is create a class and serialize it to a $_SESSION variable. Even though this article doesn’t execute any queries on the database, it could just as easily apply to such a situation resulting in the need to only query the database once for the data. Read on for some basic code.
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For quite a while I have been itching to try out some iPhone/iPod Touch development. Being currently unable to afford a Mac of any form to try it out, I thought I would still be waiting however I was lucky enough to get to borrow a MacBook for a couple of days and give it a shot.
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For quite a while now, I have had a keen interest in ASP.NET. I’ve done a couple of really small sites as a way of getting to grips with it. First was a site that was mainly just static with a built in contact form to send an email, simple stuff. My next “learning project” was a really basic blog engine that was intended to be used on jason-mitchell.com but in the end, I felt there was too much learning involved alongside my work for university and the Imagine Cup. I decided to go ahead and set up a trust WordPress blog and put my ASP.NET blog engine on a back burner for the time being.
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