Recently, I’ve been spending a lot of time working on a game for Xbox LIVE Community Games, called Operation: Star Hammer. It’s a fairly old-school shump. It has a vague story line held together by the missions that the player has to undertake.

The gameplay is quite straight forward. The player pilots a space fighter and flys from navpoint to navpoint, engaging enemies, escorting friendly ships, collecting things and so on. I’m not going to pretend that this game breaks new ground. However despite that, it’s the most fun I’ve had with a computer for a long time.

There are a few reasons why it’s been such a positive experience so far.

First, I’m using some good and familiar tools. The game is written on top of the XNA framework, which I find to be an excellent API. For a game like Operation: Star Hammer, it’s got everything I need and a lot more.

Second, it’s my first foray into making a console game. Pretty much all of my development career has been writing PC software, with the odd venture into mobile phones and PDAs. Whilst using XNA surely hides a lot of complexity (not to mention that the game itself is not really too demanding on the system resources for a modern video game console), it has been really cool seeing stuff work on a new hardware platform I haven’t worked with before.

There are other reasons, which I’ll probably go into in more detail in future posts.

Which brings me to the title of the post. Game development is a serious business these days. Budgets are often huge, and the pressure on developers to deliver more for less ever increasing. The whole point of a game is to provide entertainment, and I wonder, if the people making the game can’t or don’t enjoy the act of creating it, what are the chances of players enjoying the result? Pretty small I suspect.

Bored or frustrated designers, programmers and artists will produce work that mirrors their state of mind.

So, even if nobody else ever plays Operation: Star Hammer, at least it was fun to make it