This week saw a few issues and some changes in what I’m going to be doing. Unfortunately the week was slightly technologically marred by some network issues around at my Dad’s place and my computer being a little on the fritz. However, a visit from an engineer for the network and a bunch of clean-up tools for my computer and things seem to be running back on track pretty smoothly.

Something fairly significant happened this week – I decided to start making games. I’ve been talking about it for a while as the direction that I wanted to head in, but I hadn’t really started pushing myself in a practical, technical sense to learn the tools and actually make something. Part of me recognises that making decent games is always going to be a collaborative effort and unless I wanted to make crap, I was going to need help and hadn’t really found the right people for it. I didn’t want to find games that I could mod just for the sake of it, I wanted to find games I liked and then learn to mod them. However, I haven’t been playing games as much as I used to (sadly), so I just needed to dive in. Nik, Ian and I have been toying with the idea of setting up a company together for a little while, but we haven’t really nutted out any of the specifics of what games we’re making and how we’re going to do it, given that for the majority of the time we’re all in different countries. Anyway, all this lead up to Ian and I getting together this week and committing to spending time together each week working towards developing games. We spent a few hours just talking about the kinds of possibilities for things that we could do and eventually nutted out a pretty good rough plan. We’ll put together some more concrete notes and design documents later, but in the mean time we’ve got something to work on. I’m going to be a little on the back foot because I’m going to have to learn the technology and the frameworks first, whereas Ian will just be jumping right in to making the game assets. I found some online tutorials and got everything installed on my computer, so I’m going to have a go at learning how to use Microsoft’s XNA Framework, then develop a small game with it in conjunction to Ian. In a lot of ways it’s really just a technical test to see whether or not we work well together, so really it’s not much more than a version 0.5, although we had plenty of ideas to flesh it out to a larger game if it works well. I don’t think we’ll actually get to have something complete before I have to leave for Japan, but as I said it’s more to see if we work well… hopefully we’ll be able to finish something off by working remotely after I’m gone. Not that I’m expecting an overwhelming response, but I’m completely open to different kinds of ideas for making games… I’m more about making them than having all kinds of ideas for the actual games. So, if you’ve got an idea, feel free to send it along, or post as a comment and hopefully I can try and work out a more coherent design with you. I also need a company name… I figure making a Games division of LeithCorp might be a bit naff, so a new name would be cool. Again, send any ideas my way, or post them in the comments.

This week also had a bunch of the usual stuff – meeting up with friends to have coffee and watch movies, that kind of thing (as a side note, I managed to hook up my laptop to Dad’s big-ass speakers, which makes for much better sound!), dinner with my grandparents and spending some time talking and hanging out with my Dad. I did some work as well, although it was limited a bit by the technical difficulties. I also had a bit of fun caddying around Shirley golf course for Dad and Grandad this afternoon, which was good fun and got me out and about for a while – given that I seem to spend 90% of my time in front of a computer, it’s nice to be able to do that.