Well, Jason and Chris have continued to poke and prod me down this path I never thought I'd find myself on. I don't know how this contest is going to turn out, but I know if the talk continues like it was today, it's going to be one fun journey.
Here's a little screenshot of the download and install for Visual Studio 2005 Express.
It was a fairly painless task and registering was a cinch. I was even feeling friendly toward Microsoft and left the report anonymous statistics checkbox checked. So far I haven't noticed any incompatibilities between my other installations of Visual Basic (6.0, 2003, 2005 and now Express), so that's making me feel pretty good too.
I was also pretty excited to see this things called "starter kits" being offered by the download site for a few different arcade games. That's a pretty awesome thing in the opinion of this hobbyist and I'm excited to poke around at the code they're offering to see just what these starter kits have to offer.
I also fired up one of my older MDX projects in Express just to see what kind of changes have been made since I last updated my dlls. Not too many, but enough that I'm going to have to do some catching up to see what the new functions are that replaced the old ones I was using and what parameters some of the other functions now expect or don't expect. (DrawText, SpriteFlags and PreloadCharacters where a few that caught my eye as I was browsing the project error list)
All in all a pretty good night and oh, here's my design document as promised. It contains the basic rough sketch of the game design and some simple gameplay mechanics and basic story arc. It's not a complete design by far, but I just like to have my original thoughts and ideas down so I can start somewhere. Have a good read, I'm not hiding anything here and plan on sharing everything I do with the community. I might lose the element of surprise, but I can live with that.
I'm hoping to get some actual coding started this weekend on the first level of the game, so we'll see how well my plans coincide with that of my wife and kids ;)