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My latest project in XNA has been the recreation of a classic puzzle game originally on the Neo Geo Pocket Colour called Link Pop, the aim being to connect similar colours together to make them dissapear. A lot of people could dismiss it as another "match 3" game which appear to be flooding every indie oulet available, but it's different enough to stay away from being described as a match 3 game.

I actually built up Link Attack as part of another project I'm woking on, before deciding that the idea was strong enough to stand up on it's own. From there it was a case of copying the project to a new folder and ripping out the stuff I didn't need. The advantage of this is that I've pretty much got a new game built on a solid foundation without the need to create another menu system, or another save file handler or another high score table. Wahoo.

From there it was on to creating the extra modes while simultaniously beefing up the core engine, one of the things I love about iherritance. I also started to decide on a graphical style, originally I was going to go for a Jungle theme, monkeys, snakes, lots of green etc. I then decided that would suck! For a while now I've wanted to do something a bit edgy, everyone always complains about the ice, fire, mountain, jungle, sea etc levels in games, so what would be cool and different? In the end I got my inspiration from a Less Than Jake T Shirt i got at Leeds 2004 which features a character coloured in red, black and yellow, the character was called the "commie kid"... BINGO! I started trawling the internet for soviet communist propoganda to get an idea of style then immeditaly started drawing up ideas. Soviet Propoganda was to be the theme.

It was about this point I noticed another game on Community Games was very similar to Link Attack, I was about to pull development until I actually played this game... it was rubbish. "I can do better than that, much better" I thought, my mission was clear, make a better game than that other dude.

So here I am, Link Attack has been in development for about a month now and it's going pretty well, the gfx and sounds are still in progress and the engine still needs work, but things are starting to come together. I started work on the 2 player mode last night and that came on well after a few short hours, so thats looking good. I even started thinking about possibly putting in a 2 player mode over LIVE... but will anyone play it? One to sleep on.

I think that'll do for today.