Project Hansen XNA - Family Game Development

Last weekend, I downloaded the XNA 2.0 toolkit and get the kids involved in Software Development.  What we’re going to do is create our own Video Game.  We were able to get a very basic game that we all worked on during the weekend to run on the XBOX 360.  It’s nothing special but it did get the kids very excited about creating our own Game.

I downloaded Blender, an excellent Open Source modeling tool.  Megan has been playing around with it and has begun to understand how to create some very simple models.

Maloree was been using Garageband on the iMac to create some very basic sound effects. (Probably something better out there, but she loves using Garageband and now she has a reason to use it.)

Mark’s been creating the game attributes and creating the script for the future game we plan on developing. He’s got about 30 sheets of drawings done and has his own Folder that he put them all in.  Pretty funny but it’s great to see him put so much passion into it.

This should be fun and it will get everyone involved and get them exposed to software development. For myself, this is a nice change from the mundane development for business that I’ve been now doing for over 15 years.  Now the weekends I can keep my skills up and also have the kids involved!

The great thing about XNA is that you use Visual Studio 2005 and C# to do the development in. Since I’ve been using C# since its inception I feel really comfortable working in the environment. Now it’s learning all about 3D development and how it really works.  This should be a really fun project for the weekends and I hope the kids will stay with it for at a little while!