New Things

Well, after attempting to get a team together to get a game done in time for Dream.Build.Play 2012, and failing miserably I might add, I’ve decided that the current team isn’t working out so great as they seem to be too busy with life to contribute to a project at this time. I understand, as we all get too busy for hobbies and side projects from time to time, but that burning desire to create games will never fade from me. I’ve been thinking a lot lately and I’ve decided that I need to find a new team to work with. Whether we know each other personally, or just from online interactions, I don’t really care either way.

My dream has always been to create at least one 16-bit RPG from the glory days of my youth, gaming for hours on end trying to reach the final confrontation with Kefka in Final Fantasy VI, or hunting down Ganon and saving Zelda in A Link To The Past. Games these days seem far too eye-candy oriented and studios spend so much time and money on the visuals that they stories often suffer. When was the last time you play a game, not counting Skyrim or any MMO’s, that offered 60+ hours of gameplay, and main story that was both so compelling that it became the main reason that you played the game or the characters were so interesting that you wanted to finish every possible side quest to get all the information about their back stories?

As an XNA developer, I feel that I have the power to help drive the game development industry back to a time when games were more than just pretty graphics and explosions. Where’s the “fun” factor in games nowadays? The downside to being an XNA developer is that we often get a lot of flack due to the general low quality of the games that have been released using the XNA framework. There are a lot of games that have been uploaded to XBLIG that I would consider incredibly sub-par. This makes people who aren’t familiar with the true power of the XNA framework see it as something that isn’t to be taken seriously by game developers. This gives us, as XNA developers, an advantage too as far as I’m concerned. We’ve got a golden opportunity to put together games the likes of which have never been seen from XNA developers. It’s out duty to take our toolbox and create not just something that is fun, but something of a high quality to garner more recognition for the tools we use. I feel that XNA is incredibly underestimated and it’s about damn time that we band together and show the world what XNA can really do and beat back the reputation that XNA is only for making Minecraft clones.

I hear the argument that people who feel the same as me are outnumbered by the developers that are content with releasing sub-par games, but does that mean that we shouldn’t even attempt? Should we not fight because the odds look to be against us? When has that strategy ever worked? I hope I’m not alone when I say that XNA has been underrepresented in the past, except for a few solid gems in the rough, and it’s time for us to do something about it.

If you are interested in furthering this goal with me, then feel free to comment here, follow me on twitter, email me, or get in touch with me some other way and let’s band together to take back XNA development from the hands of people who want to release garbage just to make a few bucks. We need artists, audio engineers, story writers, programmers, voice actors, etc. If you want to fill one, or more, of these roles, then set aside some free time each week and let’s work together to show the world what a few people with the right attitude and the passion for high quality game development can do with the XNA framework.