Long Time... No Game

It's been a while.  Can't say I'm any closer to releasing a game, but I have become a better code monkey after two years at an IT desk job.  Microsoft has abandoned XNA in the time I've been away from it.  Monogame has [sort of] risen from its ashes and Unity is all the rage.  Independent game developers abound on every platform from the PC to the VITA.  Self publishing is a hot word with the coming of the new consoles this fall.  I don't think there's been a better time to be a hobbyist dev.

My wife and I also have a brand spanking new human child, so that takes a small bite out of my free time.  Still, I like to poke around in game development frameworks.  I picked up the old 2d XNA engine I started coding back in the 3.1 days.  After a couple of hours of mucking around, I've added 25% more dimensions.  Yes a simple 2.5 engine with the ability to zoom and rotate.  My dream was to create a more simplistic version of the SRPGs with which I used to spend so much time: Advance Wars, Fire Emblem, etc.  To that end, I implemented a couple new types of tiles for the engine.  I can now work with hexagons and isometric squares.

The basic tile engine displaying a hexagonal grid of water.  

Tile Engines

A 2D tile based engine will need to be implemented for my RPG. While I would have a lot of fun creating my own in between banging my head against the wall, a developer named Nick Gravelyn seems to have figured all this out in XNA 2.0. His development blog has a link the video series he created. It gets rave reviews on the App Hub forums, so as soon as school and work let up a tick, I'll start digging through these. It looks like a really nice roadmap. Hopefully I'll be able to adapt some of it to 4.0.