To get things going...

You are probably wondering right now, what is this "Alt-Entertainment" you are speaking of?
Well, that's us, a group of students at the University of Utrecht. We have a shared passion of games (and their development). Why don't you just go ahead and read our team-page, on which we try to describe ourselves and our strengths. Making such a page was, to be honest, harder than expected. It's rather hard to write a description of yourself and your strengths... There's always a slight feeling that you should be more humble, but how can you be humble when you've got to describe your strengths?

And then there was another problem, we needed a name. Countless hours (read: minutes) have we spent discussing names. There were so many options! At first we decided that we wanted to pay a tribute to the great kings of game development: Valve, Blizzard Entertainment, Infinity Ward, you name them... We came op with silly anagrams, synonyms and puns. (seriously... Snowstorm entertainment?) but that just didn't feel right. And then, out of nowhere, Martijn came up with Alt-Entertainment. For those who don't know their hotkeys: Alt+Enter is the hotkey to make things fullscreen.

But enough about the team. What matters now is the question: Why are we here? We are here to develop a game based on Rampart. Rampart is the game that influenced many Tower Defence games, which is a genre with much potential. I, for one, have spent many many hours playing Warcraft III mods, and most of these mods were (derivatives of) Tower Defence.
  
There are many different versions of Tower Defence available on the internet, mostly playable without download. These games, assuming the player has sufficient skill, can provide many hours of fun. They do lack one thing: multiplayer! Fighting endless waves of enemies isn't that fun. You know you're going to lose eventually (most of these games are endless, and highscores are based on survival-time). I never start over again when I've had a good run, because I just don't want to go though the first few levels again.
  
This brings us to points of possible improvement: playing versus a friend (or enemy, who knows?) encourages to get better, because losing isn't an option. Imagine how he/she will brag all day about how he/she has won? Also, this makes the game less repetitive,  as different opponents are likely to make different choices, so you're basically never playing the same game twice!

For now that pretty much sums up our concrete plans. We hope that you now have a basic understanding of our project. But that's just the result we're aiming for and it surely is a long way to go. So why don't we discuss what development is going to look like during the project?  As with all game development, programming will be a big part of the project. Luckily, we have a passion for this so it is not a problem at all! We will do the programming work in C# within the XNA framework. Since we are aiming for multiplayer gameplay we also need to write the appropriate server software that enables two players to play together. This will also be programmed in C#. As on the graphical side, we are not completely sure yet.

Graphics are a big part of every modern game! In almost every way it is what evokes the gamer's first feeling about the corresponding game. Especially games that are small, pick up and play games, need to grasp the gamers the moment they see it. That's why we want to get this right. It is also the reason that we can't discuss this subject in more detail because we just have not decided on it yet! We are playing with a couple of ideas, ranging from a super minimalistic style to a cartoony based graphic style. The downside is that we do not have a dedicated graphics designer so it will be a challenge to come up with something special. This only is makes us more determined to make this project work! Where problems arise we see challenges that we would love to take on.

In the coming weeks you will find regular updates on this blog where we will comment on the development progress and discuss game details when we are ready to release them. If you're eager for more news on our project, this is the place where you will get it.

Well, that's it for now, we hope you're currently as exited as we are (which is very unlikely, because damn, we're exited!)