I have thought of it so many times, and dismissed it for various reasons. Too hard, too much cutthroat competition, not enough time, not a viable way to make money, way too many wanna-bes I don’t want to get classified with them. But damnit, there is no other thing I would rather waste some spare time on than writing video games.
I think the main reason I got interested in programming and playing with computers at all was games. I would never have given a second look at my Dad’s TRS-80 if he hadn’t shown me how to load up some game, he acquired from who knows where, with the data cassette drive and start playing.
You are in a dark cave, there is a hallway to the west, another to the east and a smell of rotting flesh from the south, you have a pocket knife, and there is a torch on the floor…. What do you want to do?
I learned BASIC on that thing just so I could try and mimic what the authors of that wonderful game had done, and my love of programming came from video game roots.
Man, I was hooked, from then on I would have trouble with my body weight, because I would prefer to sit in front of the TRS-80, Atari, IBM PC AT, Beltron, Commodore 64, Nintendo, Sega Genesis, PlayStation, N64, PlayStation 2 than do other stuff. I mean sure I played sports, and did all kinds of other stuff, but sometimes it was a battle to pull myself from playing River City Ransom one more time, “This time I’ll win without buying the cowboy boots!”
Anyway, since then I have gotten degree’s in Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering, have taken numerous programming courses, have done programming professionally, and have always thought of doing game programming, but never had the guts to follow through. Always doing what other people thought was a more viable means of making money. But hell, I have a day job. I get paid that way, if I am going to do side work, that may eventually become a way to get paid, I need to do something I have passion for.
And video games are that passion. So yeah, add me to the list of all the geeky wanna-be’s who tried this. Because I am trying. My goal is to have something playable by the end of September, and hopefully sooner. And yeah I am going to the dark side to do this, because if I do want to eventually make some money on this, I need to maximize that chance. I am going to try and do this in C# with DirectX on windows.
GASP! I thought you hated windows?! I thought you were mister Linux. Well I got news for you, to quote a lovable scoundrel, “Look, I ain’t in this for your revolution. … I expect to be well paid. I’m in it for the money.”
So I start today, actually I started about 3 days ago, but I publically start today. So watch this space, for the next revolution in gaming. 
Good luck. Hopefully you stick with it longer than I did. What’s your plan for a game (FPS, 3D, RPG, side-scroll, etc)?
Starting out it will probably be 2D one screen games, little puzzle games, etc to get started and learn the APIs. From there I am not sure, we’ll see how things feel. I have always liked those simple puzzle games so I may play with them for a while. But I always liked some of the simpler side-scroll too, so I will probably play with them and wait until I get enough cash to afford a machine that can handle doing managed directX 3D stuff well. I have been playing with some of the 3D stuff already, I downloaded the Visual C# 2005 Beta from Microsoft, and the DrectX SDK and have been running through tutorials I found online.
I have been bookmarking everything I find under my gameprogramming tag at del.icio.us
Polygons. It’s all about polygons. You can make the next Virtua Fighter.
Seriously, though, make the next Snood (or equivalent) which pretty much made it to every computer I’ve ever seen on a college campus, and there were plenty of suckers (like anthony) who paid for the full version.
I can second Snood, people loved that game. It is very addictive.
River City Ransom was awesome. Focus on that, there’s not enough shit kickin’ Double Dragon type games anymore. Good luck.
[...] So I think I’ll save my big ideas for any Science Fiction that I eventually get around to writing. And continue to take action on my current general goal [...]