2.5 years too late?
In June 2006 I quite Microsoft with the goal of being a game developer - or something along those lines. Technically I suppose I achieved the goal as Microsoft paid me good money to write 3 demo games for the early versions of XNA Game Studio and MSDN paid me to write 3 of the most simple games ever. But really you know that doesn't count does it.
Somehow 2.5 years have gone past, I've managed to pay my bills with those jobs and a handful of others some involving Manged DirectX or XNA Framework, and some that were just ways to pay the bills for a few months.... and that's the problem isn't it. 2.5 years has gone by, my job satisfaction and work life balance is fantastic but I'm really not qualified to call myself a game developer and that sucks.
Even worse Microsoft now have Community Games on the Xbox 360 - they provided me with a tool set that matched my managed developer background, they hired me early on to work on the API before almost nobody outside of Microsoft had seen it, as an MVP I've had access to information that should have given me a strategic advantage, and they gave me a distribution mechanism and I appear to have been sitting on my arse for 30 months. Nobody has ever said it to me but most people are probably thinking "What a lazy Zman you are.....".
So, not that I really have time between one well paid job, one part time startup and a super secret non game development project but over the weekend I looked through my huge stack of 'ideas' that I have written in a book and in thousands of post its and I spent a few hours on Sunday writing code to generate the data I need. Things that you think should be easy are not always and that's all I am saying for now. Between real work today I got all the requisite items rendering on the screen so tomorrow I can implement the basic gameplay.
No screen shots yet or information yet, but I have preserved the early renderings to laugh at later and now I have a blog post for you all to mock me with if I don't get it finished. I expect the whole world to manage my time for me here since I obviously am terrible at it.