Is it possible to make a game completely out of numbers, as in the background, 'cause I was wanting to do that.
Is it ossible to make that in Notepad then put it into a game?  Just trying to be creative here, just trying not to be monotonous with Game Design.

Do you mean only rendering using numbers? Sure.

Why write it in Notepad, though? That's just a pain when Visual C# Express is free and terrific. Otherwise you'll have to get mighty comfortable with compiling your game through the command line. Not to mention trying to debug it at that point. Just stick to VC# Express and save yourself the hassle.

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Nick Gravelyn -- Microsoft XNA MVP
XNA Wiki | Zune Games

I think he's talking about making the background in notepad and putting it in as the background for the game. Sure, that's possible. You can just make what you want in notepad and hit the print screen button, then paste the screenshot that takes into paint or photoshop or whatever. Then save it as an image, load it into the game and voila! A game made of numbers.

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My project: The X-Engine

    Yeah thats what I ment, making the backgrounds, textures, ect using numbers and characters. Also I'll try that using notepad and GIMP if it'll do it like paint, where you paste it in and save it as an image. I'm really looking forward to this small little project now, since I'm going to have to plan more to get the desired image to come out, instead of drawing it with Pixel Art, with something like GraphicsGale, or using GIMP to draw it out, etc.

Actually it's really easy, more than you think. You can do it all in GIMP, why bother using notepad? Just create a transparent layer and write some text to fill it all the way, then just save it as a image format that support transparent such as .png and load it in game as a background image. By doing this you have more control as you can just change a color value which the render target surface is cleared from Cornflower blue to any color and you'll end up with that color combined with text.

    Yes, that is exactly what I'm going to do now, I'll use GIMP and use the tips you said.  Thanks for telling me that GIMP would do that as I have never done that kind of thing before in it.  It makes it more versatile now.  Thank you!  I'm going to try to design it now.

You don't even really need to bother using XNA for this.
It seems to me like you could easily make a console based game (C++ or C# Console) and just do Console.Writeline("*====*====*====*====*\n||    ||    ||    ||    ||\n");
etc.

Using this method you could create a room like this:
*====*====*====*====*
||        ||        ||        ||        ||
||        ||        ||        ||        ||
||        ||        ||        ||        ||
||        ||        ||        ||        ||
||        ||        ||        ||        ||
#####################
#####################

And then get creative for rendering a character.
Of course I'm using other ASCII symbols here but just numbers would work.

Great theory unless you want to run on the 360...

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