ReMix08 - The Initial Shock...

Well, would you believe I have been asked by Microsoft to give a talk at their ReMix 08 conference on XNA. The conference it's self is primarily concerning Web development but they are having an 'after hours' section on XNA.

Now I know what you are thinking, "WOW! that's great!" and that was my initial reaction, but as I read on through the email from Paul Foster, a Microsoft Evangelist, a cold chill fell over my body, my palms began to sweat and I almost started to cry. They wanted me to talk for an hour in front of around 300 people. Any one who knows me, knows I am not the worlds greatest public speaker. In fact, that and wasps are the only things on earth that I fear, I will happily enter a pit of tigers, bears and mothers-in-law and wrestle them all to the death, but public speaking and wasps and I turn to jelly. I actually don't advocate the wresting of bears and tigers, they are endangered animals and this should not be a past time anyone should take part in. Mother-in-laws on the other hand are open sport but should only be wrestled when appropriate. I am gutted really, I would love to be able to do the talk, I am almost over my phobia of wasps, I have to be, I don't want my children to have the same silly fear I have of them so I just let them fly by, also I think it would look bad if my young daughters saw there dad screaming and running like an idiot just because an insect entered the room. Alas my other phobia is long off being cured, oh well one day eh..

Thankfully Paul was very understanding when I said that I have an issue with speaking and has agreed to let me write the demo for him to present. I have actually finished the final game demo it's self and I am currently putting together the demo projects to show various elements of XNA and how the game comes together. I was surprised at how fast it all came together, I just took the components off my blog and put them together to create the demo game. I guess it took me about two weeks to write in all.

I am going to retrospectively blog the progress of this demo game, and put up some code snippets from it, for example the particle system (much the same as I have posted here before). I guess to show how easy it was to come up with a game in XNA in such a short time. Now don't get me wrong, it's not a AAA game, but what do you expect from a hobbyist, and two weeks development, I think it's pretty cool, but then I would, I wrote it :) In fact, I enjoyed writing it so much I am thinking of evolving it into a full game, adding networking and all sorts.

Here is how it looks now, in my later blogs I will post clips of how it came together, hope you like the look of it.