Developing my own awesome game

Programming my own game was long time ago THE reason to learn programming. I started learning programming with Visual Basic 6 and Direct Draw 7. Then a couple of years later I tried Python and gave Panda3D a chance (really liked this one). But I never accomplished something that i could really show to other people.
This will change this time :-) Right now I am programming my own 2D multiplayer space shooter in XNA. 2D means in this case, that all action takes place on a 2D plane, but I use a 3D engine. In this blog I want to show you my progress and share the things I have learned working on my little project.
If you are interested in the current state of my game you can have a look at my pivotal tracker project.
Here are the tools, libraries etc. that I currently use:

• SunBurn 2.0 - As far as I know the best XNA graphics engine.
• Mercury - Really awesome particle engine. I can really recommend it. Also looked at DPSD but Mercury has an editor, which is a big plus.
• ParallelTasks Threading Library - TPL for XNA. The Xbox has three cpu cores. We have to use all of them! With this library this is much easier in comparison to thread programming.
• Jitter Physics - Nice multi threaded open source physics engine.
• Indiefreaks Game Profiler - Nice tool to see how much time is spend and how much memory is getting allocated in each function.

Finally a screen shot how the game currently looks like. In motion it looks much better because of my cool parallax scrolling stars background (uses a vertex shader). But more on this in a later post. Next time I will describe the architecture of my game.