The Plan:
I want to make a game using XNA that is takes into account a PC and an Xbox360. I dont mean im going to try and publish the game on either, but what I mean is design it to use both a keyboard and a monitor and a Xbox360 controller and a television screen.
I also want to pratice my Inkscape skills, as I like the ease of use and the style that it creates.
This game is also for learning purposes, I dont want to spend more then a few weeks working on it at most.
The Design:
The game will have you play as a Jellyfish in the middle of the ocean. You suck in water and release it to propell yourself in the direction you are facing. The objective it to collect items while avoiding colision with obsticles*. It is similar to the ribbon game found on cell phones.
Implimentation:
I plan to prototype a few ideas that I wish to impliment in future games that the XNA library makes possable. Those ideas are as follows:
Rotation: Since ive been a SDL programmer I wasnt aloud to do much with my surfaces. I want to have it so that you rotate yourself in the direction you want to go, and it will launch yourself in that direction.
Skelital Animation: Each part of the jellyfish will be seperate, allowing for easy to do animation. This will definatly be the most interesting yet complex part of the game to design and impliment.
Alpha: This may seem very minute but with SDL something such as Alpha was very computation heavy. I hope to impliement this to add to the enviornment of the game such as looking like your in water, seeing throught the jelefish, etc...
Entity based world: The way I wish to design the levels is to have a large blank surface where i can place entitys on such as the fishing nets, sharks, sharp coral, etc...
The Concepts:
Setting XNA up to use the mouse, keyboard, and gamepad is pretty easy. I had my system done in about a half hour and it supports mouse and keyboard, just gamepad, or all 3.
Good luck!