Hi Gamedev,

I've been for the past few months working on a specific form of gameplay I'd like to design for a game, but having never really designed anything final (only small stuff, such as tutorials and minor tweaks on XNA Game Studio) I was wondering if anyone has a few pointers on doing the following:

• Rush past the visual game engine details, ideally have something to some-extent already setup and ready to use (this is non-commercial, just for testing so if there are such options you can name them)
• Not bother with content or story per se. The most content I'll bother with is some terrain, a puppet the user controls and a few enemy puppets to take the beating.
• Able to have some form of documentation as far as it goes towards gameplay coding, or references of some sort.
• Whatever framework I can rely on to avoid straining myself over details, is ideally programmable using languages such as C++, C#, Java or something very closely related to those, since they're the ones I've covered to some extent and are most comfortable for me.

Thanks for any suggestions and pointers towards getting this thing started.

Lupo.

There are a number of tools you could use to help accelerate the process of making a game. I assume you plan to make a 2D game. Most of the following advice would still help for making a 3D game, but I do not recommend attempting to make a 3D game until you have more experience with game creation.

There are some game engines that are built on top of XNA such as FlatRedBall. There is also Unity which uses C# and you could use one of the 2D libraries for it to help make a 2D game more easily. Game Maker does not have C++, C#, or Java as a language it supports but it does have GML and it can produce nice results quickly.

Thanks for your input, I have hopped onto the Unity system for the past couple of days and I've been through a good bit of progress =]