During the hey-day of the XBox 360, when indie games were in the midst of it's first renaissance, I set about to make a game that was a mix between casual controller-based gameplay and involved systems and simulation. That game was called Stingray Incursion. You pilot a helicopter through a procedurally generated world serving as the backdrop for a fixed story pivoting around fixed set-pieces. (Bonus: it was set in the same universe as my old web comic Freight, which no longer exists).

In 2012 I was still pretty young and enthusiastic, and I felt that I'd rather embark on the challenge of dealing with the low-level stuff myself. XNA provided the necessary Direct-X interfaces in the language that I love, C#. It wouldn't be the first time that I built low-level graphics pipelines and an asset engines. At university I worked on a pool-table simulation in Visual C++ and Direct-X 7. The game quicly took shape, I put down the main control systems, the HUD, a full day and night cycle, I built rudimentary AI and a few classes of enemies and it was a blast. And then Microsoft pulled the plug on XNA and their C# support for their Direct-X suite.

I never fully recovered from the deprecation of the Game Studio SDK, and with it, the termination of my hard work of several years. I'm still immensily proud of what I had built though, but unfortunately (because of the Game Studio dependency) all I have to show for it these days is a pretty low-quality gameplay video, a few sceenshots, and a series of development blog posts.