Hello World! #OneGameAMonth, Tutorials, and Zombies!

So, since I never complete any of my projects, I've decided to get right into #OneGameAMonth and start making small games. I'm going to attach another constraint and make games in genres I don't normally like. First up I'm making an endless runner, and since most of my ideas have included zombies, I based it around running from zombies.

It's tentative name is "Zombies!!! Run!!!" and right now its being built in XNA 4.0, with the possibility of getting ported into windows 8 and tablets and phones and whatnot if I can figure out the content processor in MonoGame.

You are some dude/gal that is trapped in a creepy school in a seemingly endless hallway filled with crates, lockers, dead bodies, radioactive fluid, and other crazy stuff that acts as obstacles. Your goal is to avoid the obstacles and the zombies chasing after you, hitting an obstacle will allow the zombies to catch up to you. Once the zombies get you, its game over.

Right now I've made a prototype using the Game Management Sample as a starting point, swapped out some menu graphics and created a scrolling background in the gameplay screen. Then I added 3 different rectangles to represent the Player, Zombie Horde, and Obstacles, and put it together with a beginning and end. This gives me 3 weeks to polish it up and add content, and a winning condition, maybe extra levels outside the creepy school.

Moving forward, I hope to create games in the following genres:

• Rogue-like 
• Metroidvania 
• Turn based RPG
• Puzzle
• Strategy

Also in this blog, I will be documenting my progress creating a tile engine and subsequently, a game - possibly a Zelda style dungeon crawler, since we can never have enough of those. This will cover MonoGame, Windows 8 and XNA development. The goal is to get 2 posts a week, one being a tutorial for the Tile Engine, the other being an update on One Game a Month. Sometimes, the two will be related, but currently - Game 1, "Zombies!!! Run!!!" is a standalone project.