There are a few reasons why my attention to AngelXNA has picked back up lately:
- Jeff has been actively developing AngelXNA
- The Global Game Jam is coming up in just a few months! (more on that very soon)
- I was asked to give a presentation on game prototyping and AngelXNA at WPI for the Game Development Club’s New Developer Track (which I’m very happy they still put on), and… I did.
The talk itself wasn’t stellar. I made several “newbie speaker” mistakes (like not introducing myself and not explaining more of the background of AngelXNA) and I didn’t have a chance (I was asked to give the talk very last minute) to get to know my audience better, so the emphasis and aim of the talk may have been a bit off.
Regardless, it was a good experience, and it demonstrated to me that AngelXNA could really use some more love in the documentation and specifically the “getting started” departments before it’s ready for Prime Time (Global Game Jam 2010).
So I’ve decided it’s time for me to revisit the ol’ girl and see what I can do to help. Immediate tasks are:
- Go through the existing documentation and clarify some of the particularly unclear parts
- Write up a few significantly more detailed pages on some of AngelXNA’s key features (Actors, Messaging, and Input come to mind)
- Create a few one-week games to test out just how well AngelXNA meets its goal (of making such a process easy and fun) to jog my mind through new ideas for AngelXNA and new insight into how to make it super-easy to pick up
As always, I draw inspiration from Ruby on Rails, which is the web development framework that completely reinvigorated my love for web development and made it fun again. In particular, the official community Rails Guides are, in my opinion, a Gold Standard by which to judge all other documentation. I’d love to have just a few guides to AngelXNA that approach a Rails Guides-level of quality.
If any of you have used AngelXNA, I’d love to hear your feedback on how we can make it easier to pick up or just friendlier in general.