Day 1: Well it's about time I got this started.. I've been hashing out a game I want to make in my head for a while now. Finally, I'm getting ready to do something about it.
The Stars are aligned. The moon is pregnant with possibilities and I've got a full 12pack in the fridge.
This is going to be my little Place where I'm going to vent and rant and share my findings as I figure out how to make a game for the pc.
What's been decided so far:

• 2d or 3d : Well the thought of making a fully 3d game is nice. There's just me. 3D adds a whole Lot of more work. So this first game is going to be 2-D, that's not saying I won't be using pre-rendered images for the sprites.
• Game mechanics: Well I've been refining them in my head for a while. I've done some pseudo playtesting in photoshop(well scribbles is more like what it turned out looking like) But it is going to be a variation of the match 3 gameplay. But I've got some twists that I've never seen implemented before... so It's going to be interesting how it turns out.
• Target Size: Ideally this is going to be a downloadable game, so a 5-12 meg demo version and the full version weighing in at around 25-30meg, I've also tossed around the idea of publishing a Deluxe CD version with videos etc etc through Lulu.com But first things first. eh?
• Game Engine: well this came down to a) create one from scratch b)find a free one c)use a commercial engine. I looked at what it takes to create DirectX programming from scratch and decided that was more than I'm willing to bite off. I looked a all the free engines I could find online... And there were a LOT of incomplete ones, and a lot of broken ones. Python and Pygame were nice though, but it felt a bit sluggish, Popcap's framework looked robust but I'm really just not that fond of java. So eventually I looked at gamemaker, blitz, a couple others, and then I got an email from GarageGames.com announcing the Torque 2D engine early adopters beta. After taking a look at the demos and reading about it around the web It looks like it was the perfect fit for what I want to do. Oh and an extra bonus.. It'll compile out to Mac as well as PC, thats nice.
• Title: Well I've got a couple ideas but the overall theme of the game is currently up in the air as well, I know what I would LIKE to do, but We'll see how much time and effort its going to take.

I've worked through the basic tutorials and am coming to grips with the engine, its scripting language is definatly a different mindset when compared to the C#, javascript, PHP & perl I usually use.

Next up: Creating a quick mockup of basic gameplay to validate the design and guide the interface design.