Thursday, September 4, 2008

First Game - Flash Cards

Not so much a game, but imagine not having to look all over the floor for the lost cards, or ripped ones, slobbered on, etc.

A few years ago I made a simple program if you can call it that using Power Point.  Simply put it would roll through the letters of the alphabet, and also read the letter aloud.  It also included numbers, shapes, colors, animals, and other objects, and phonic sounds for the alphabet.

Now I have decided to learn computer programming, and Microsoft has a great tool set out called XNA that uses C#.  With this I am making this same program for Windows and the Xbox 360.

So far it is actually going well, I should have started with Pong, or "Hello World"...  But I like a challenge, and I like to learn as much as I can by myself, sometimes just with trial and error.  Over the next few days I will post the first screen shots, and soon I will share this program for beta testing with some of my friends that have kids so we can improve upon the ideas.

Hopefully in the end, it will be something that parents find useful.  While it will read the letters, we found it better to turn down the sound a bit and engage with our son while using the program.  It has fun colors, you can always find them, and it will always be in order!

You might have to worry about slobber on the controller or mouse though.

----

I started over with the code, here is what you can call an early alpha screenshot (or something).  All colors are just temporary, the font is temp, etc.



No comments: