One of my real ‘things’ is playing and developing video games – ideally I want to work in video game development, and that was my plan until a certain bank turned down my application for postgraduate funding (and there’s no way I can afford the costs from my own savings). So, instead of my MSc course, I’m having to teach myself… No doubt I’m going to miss out on a lot of stuff this way, but it should still give me enough of an edge to get into the industry. (especially if things go as well as I want them to)
My current ‘project’ is a sort of bubble shooter, and it’s just in the design stages at the moment, but as experimentation I had a go using Microsoft’s XNA game studio – and I’m really impressed. Working through Riemer’s 2D tutorial showed just how simple it is to get a playable game up and running, and laid the groundwork on lots of basic useful stuff for getting the bubble game off to a healthy start.
Having used MOGRE before to do my 3D solar simulation (you can download it here), I know how tricky it can be to get things going – I would say that in XNA (in 2D at least) it is much easier. Though this may in part be due to my experience from MOGRE, I’m pretty sure XNA is the better. It also performs better on the cpu, by only calling update 60 times a second – stopping the massive load on the CPU I encountered with MOGRE (renders and updates as fast as it can). The 60 times per sencond also makes animation and control much easier!
So I will continue to work with XNA, and this week I’ll be trying to get a set of reasonable 2d graphics ready for use in the prototype stage. I’ll post screenshots and so on when I have some.
Bomadeno.com 
Geek 8D.
You told me to stop commenting with names, but… Who can resist such an opening?
2nd comment!
but you need see 3d in xna, it is hard.
work mogre with 3d graphics is easier than xna, xna is very very hard in 3d grhapics…
I’ve still never tried XNA for anything beyond 2d, though I should just for the experience… what did you find particularly hard? (maybe you save me having to experiment :D)
Right now I’m working in Unity3D, and despite some annoyances, it certainly provides a quick start in 3D game development! (compared to MOGRE, at least)