My quest to break into the industry: New approach/Coming out party

I decided today that working on my own in my cave might not be the best of plans. I was on the Dallas IGDA website today and found a post in the forums for an "Ad Lib game development group". The group's mission is to get together every 4-6 weeks and crank out a single game in 24 hours. They use C#/XNA for the games, which is right up my ally since I use C# now in my job.

Needless to say I sent in a request to join the group. I could create all the mods that I want, but without networking, no one will know I exist. This seems like a wide open door that I have to walk through. Right now there are only 4 guys in the group. I'm not sure of all of their professional statuses, but I know one of them works at GearBox.

I'm also going to publish this blog up on my facebook page as my official coming out. I haven't really been too up front with my plans to get back into game development because I wasn't sure if I was 100% committed to it yet. Since I started this a little over a month ago, its really all I can think about. The projects I'm working on at work are driving me crazy because they offer me no challenge. This is what i want to do.

All that being said...I still think I have a bit to go. I still need to get back up to par with my C++ if I want to have any chance at a legitemit game dev job, I need to play more games, and now I need to learn the XNA framework if I want to contribute to this group.

On a side note I did work on my mod a bit since the last time I posted. Another couple of addtions. I got my entity to drain life when it's shot, and to throw sparks and explode when it dies. I don't want to abandon this project, because I'm having fun with it. I'm hoping the next time that I work on it, that I can get my entity to fire back.

I also subcribed to the Game Developer magazine digital edition. The digital edition is really cool because I can view it on my iPhone and read it at work (God bless the iPhone!)

All and all it's been a pretty busy week and I'm hoping next week will be even better!

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