First crack at a hobby game

Oh how exciting. My first blog. Not really sure the protocols or what's acceptable on this site. But I've been a member of Gamasutra for over 10 years so I figured it was time I tried something other than reading the articles.

I'm attempting to create a game from scratch in C#. This whole .NET craze is really taking off, but in my small corner of the world there's not much call for it. So I figured I'd teach myself rather than get left behind.

If you're curious about reading about some random guy trying to make a game in his spare time please feel free to read on. Otherwise I'd suggest skipping to the next blog to see what they're doing.

Here's what I've gotten done so far (it's going to be a tower defense game):
* Created an engine of sorts. It loads textures, game states, matrixes, etc. Most of that nitty gritty people usually don't think about. Basically coped from a book (teaching myself C# don't forget.)
* Got a load screen that gives options to start game, edit level, or quit
* Can place a tower on the screen
* Tower will shoot at enemies that get close enough
* Can designate Walkable and Buildable cells
* Path is found using A*; leaning towards Best First searching rather than Dijkstra
* Implmented  a spawn rate so they don't all show at once.

The problem I face right now is once there's about 50 guys on the screen the program greatly slows down. I can think of a few places to speed up the process, which I'll implement. However I really want to thread this program so I'm going to have to do some restructuring to get that properly set up. I really look forward to that part.

That's about it for now.