So I’ve been hard at work on a new game project which I’ll announce in a couple of days probably, but for the moment I’m still working on just reproducing Lost Dog with XNA.

A big part of Lost Dog (it being a Visual NOVEL) is that there is a lot of text and where there is text in gaming there are fonts and where there are fonts there are copyright laws.

Luckily, I made my own font for Lost Dog originally, so it’s just a matter of making it an actual TrueType Font (the kind of fonts which Windows uses).

Here’s the thing:

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So this is the first post of the dev blog for Silhouette Games and I guess I should say what I’m up to…

First and foremost, about two months ago now, I decided that I wanted to make a game of my own. I had just played 999: 9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors and had really enjoyed myself, so I decided that a graphical text adventure (or Visual Novel) as they’re currently known sounded like fun.

I didn’t want to get carried away, so I set my sights simply (for once) and made a quick Tech Demo. It only took me a few weeks to regain my bearings and do the job, and at the end of March (with a little artistic help from my friend Victoria Tao), the Lost Dog Technical Demo was made available for both PC and Mac using VERGE.

I had done it. The demo was finished, people were downloading and commenting positively, and now I could move on to just making a full version.

But I wanted to do more.

As much as I enjoyed going back to my roots and making a game using VERGE - even playing with Lua - I found that VERGE was a little too unsupported at the moment for my taste. I would have problems and there would be no one to answer them. Don’t get me wrong, I still love those guys and I think that the VERGE community is a great place for budding programmers and game designers to get their start, and I will continue to pop my head in every once in a while and possibly release another VERGE game later, BUT the technical demo had shown me that it was time to move on.

I purchased an XBox 360 (something my inner-child shuddered at) and I began learning Visual C# and XNA Studio 4.0.

Currently I’m in the middle of a book that has me making a puzzle game. My goal is to get through this book with a greater understanding for XNA programming so that I can first recreate the Lost Dog Technical Demo (for 360) and then move on to making the full Visual Novel. Given everything that I’m learning, I don’t think that it will be too difficult and I predict a late(?) June release (PC only) at the latest.

It’s a little crazy to be working on this side of things these days, but what can I say?

I hope to post more pictures if and when they exist, but for now I’ll leave you with this:

I think Moby might be the best music that I can listen to when I program. I’m listening to “In This World” right now and it’s pretty awesome.

Highly. Recommended.

Hi there, World.