Parade of Rain

That’s how the title of blog entries suffer when I’m caught listening to some catchy tune. I made a new Dev Blog entry for WildBoarders over at xbox360homebrew and I posted an article in my Tutorials section for dealing with large 2D worlds in fast paced scrolling games.

On the gaming front, Gears of War kicks major ass. I was skeptical after the initial announcement many months ago. I just couldn’t see how the gameplay would end up interesting, but the graphics were sure a joy to look at. Regardless I caved into the hype. Fortunately, it has lived up to the hype in every way if not more. The gameplay truly delivers and it’s a very well polished (understatement of the year) game. Got Tony Hawk’s Project 8 also. Haven’t played a Tony Hawk game in years, so coming back to it was a bit refreshing. Haven’t tried online yet, but the leaderboards for the single player game are great on their own. Wii is coming out at the end of this week so I can’t wait to get my hands on that! In between all of that I’m still playing BF 2142 somehow. Yea, I’m pretty…um…deep into the whole gaming thing, development and all. Not sure I still manage to make time to go out on the weekends . Either way, this fall/winter should be an exciting time for gaming and game development!

Seems progress for the game has slowed down a tad over the last week, but I’m getting there . XNA Beta 2 came out this past week so I spent a little time porting that. I made a new dev entry over at xbox360homebrew so go check it out! I added a new image to the gallery also. On a side note, Adam Stewart, the artist for WildBoarders, launched his new site last week! So go check out Vertigo Boom and try to see if you can figure out what it means. I’ll give you a cookie if you do. As for the camera tutorial, I’ll be porting it to beta 2 when I have a chance. For those trying to use it right now I believe the entire source is throughout the article so starting a new project wouldn’t be too bad anyway, which is a good way to learn in my opinion. I’ll make use of the content pipeline in the new example and probably add a feature or two to the camera class. It’ll probably be tracking and scaling. I also posted a new video of WildBoarders. You can find the download link below:

I’ll post a new entry when I get the tutorial updated. But that’s it for now. See you next week, bye!

I realize there’s been a delay on my updates on this blog. But if you follow the xbox360homebrew site you’ll know I’ve been keeping up with my weekly updates. You can find my 7th dev entry there describing the art process of my game. Seems like everything is pressuring me to update update update! WordPress just released a new version that I’m going to eventually get around to. Most exciting is XNA Game Studio Express released Beta 2. I think I’ll be spending this weekend migrating the code over. My biggest concern is my map load routines and how the content pipeline managers textures. Does it detect duplicates and not load another copy into memory if I try to load the same file 3-4 times or not? Once I download the beta I’ll experiment with that. Not too fond of re-importing all of my files and fixing alot of the things that were changed, but hey, that’s what beta is for and the changes are welcomed . Plus, it’ll give me a chance to refactor alot of the ‘bad’ code made from experimenting. Thankfully, I still have my XNA beta 1 install should things go horribly wrong. I added a few images into the gallery showing some of the art process/sketches for WildBoarders.

In other news, I’m actively consumed by Battlefield 2142. Going to be competing in leagues and ladders with some buddies on it very soon . I also got a few reservations set for some 360 and Wii games. November is going to be full of great games! Going to have an official development update at the end of this weekend on my contest entry so keep an eye out for it.