After years of not doing any game development, one of my good friends on Xbox Live approached me with the idea of creating a game inspired by Pokemon's battle system, but designed to be far more competitive. If any of you have ever played Pokemon Online or similar, you would know how broken default Pokemon is for balanced and competitive play because of all the rules that have to be applied to make it play well.

It may seem like our idea is a ripoff of Pokemon, but in reality the primary similarity is only creatures battling each other on a turn by turn basis. Most of the actual game mechanics are quite different (or function differently). Once my friend is back from Orlando (he's the coach for the MLG pro team Turning Point, with Walshy, Naded, Ninja and Mikwen) I'll get him to make an account here so that he can describe the game in more detail. He's far more familiar with the concepts than me. Something I will say though is nothing is left to randomness. The game's title, Tensai, is an allusion to its core idea: outsmart your opponent to win.

We've been trying to find an artist, but unfortunately that's not easy. We have an artist trying their hand at concept art, but he may not be able to make art in the style we want and he's pretty busy.

To test our plans (well, mainly his) I've been writing a prototype in VB Net. The actual game will be written in C#, since that's XNA's official language and we want to put the game on the 360's indie marketplace when it's done. When the prototype is a bit farther along, I'll probably post a build here for people to test out (only player vs AI though. I won't be wasting time writing online play for a prototype).