Since Washington State and King County have abandoned the sacred institution of the secret ballot in favor of saving some change and forcing everyone to go buy a stamp and mail in their votes, I had to spend much of this Nov. 1 doing my democratic duty with a pen. Other duties performed today, include, but are not limited to: fatherly, husbandly, and juggle-ly.
Anyway, I had like 20 minutes left in the day to work on it. I decided since it was only a small amount of time, prototyping would be a good idea! I fired up the ol' Visual Studio and created a new C# program--my prototyping language of choice, due to its rapid compile and coding times, without giving up such niceties as a familiar syntax and strict compile-time typing--and realized, staring at a WinForm, that it would be sort of a pain to get sprites on it moving around and doing things. In retrospect, it probably wouldn't really be that bad. But it seemed pretty unpalatable to me at the time.
So I went and (spent quite a lot of time) downloading XNA Game Studio 4.0, having used the 2.0 carnation to create a game rather successfully and enjoyably in the past. The goal here is still to target mobile devices with code mostly in C++ (and XGS4 actually targets Windows Phone 7 (aliass WP7, WinMo7), though I probably won't be using that--I hear there's no native code at all!)
Anyway - the goal, as I said - is a quick prototype on the PC. Hopefully I'll be able to mimic finger gestures to some extent with a mouse (laptop track pad may prove helpful here).
Tomorrow: Some actual progress (I hope), plus I talk about games on the Kindle! Though only briefly and tangentially, so don't get your hopes too up or down.
