New Website and Plans! (Not April Fools)

Alright. Let's get this started. I've been long enough without a proper website, and without a proper log of my explorations. I can't guarentee that what will be written here will be interesting or useful, but I'm going to post here anyway!

While I think my previous layout and design was all well and good, it was still contained an undeniable amount of suck. The design was a (failed) attempt at being clever. This time, rather than spend an inordinate amount of time and its layout and looks, I'll let those who've done it better show me the way so I can focus on actually filling it.

Plans! Man do I have plans. I'm really going to work on that tactical RPG this time. Last try with Qt and C++, I got a dog to move across an ugly heightmap. It was rather poorly designed and thought out. Afterall, why start from scracth when an apparently new era has dawned: the era of game frameworks. I considered three: Unity, UDK, and XNA, and ended up choosing XNA. Why?

Mainly because XNA was the most barebones of the three. Unity and UDK are both full featured customizable engines that really only need some scripting and content before you've got a full-fledged game. They come with tools, their own pre-defined pipelines, and rendering systems. Granted, these can all be customized to your liking through their scripting interfaces, but the whole point of this exercise was to learn the inner workings of a game engine! With Unity and UDK, the engine is already there. You're just building a game around it.

XNA is a little different. It's a framework for building game engines, rather than being a framework for building games. All it really provides is a barebones game loop and a bunch of boilerplate utility classes. It's exactly what I'm looking for, really. Also it has the additional benefit that I get to learn some C#, which I've oooed and ahhed at in the past but never really gotten a chance to actually use. However, this also means I'll have to write my own toolset for my game, and that's a daunting task in its own right. But I've been toying with SlimDX, and so I get to do more C#! Ooos and Ahhs all around.

Of course, aside from that I still have to finish the rest of this site. And apply for more jobs. Weee.