Parade of Rain

Christmas is around the corner (for those that celebrate it), along with New Years. It’s a busy time of the year that’s for certain, and I’m busy just like the rest of you. Mark Coffman announced the winners and prizes for the xbox360homebrew contest over the last week, and I’m certainly happy at the results . In regards to WildBoarders, the game has reached over one thousand downloads this past week! Exciting news for me anyway. I won’t be updating for about a week after tonight’s update as I’ll be up in Ohio for Christmas. I figured I’d leave an update on “what’s cooking” and a taste of things to come.

I’ve gotten my subscription setup for the XNA Creators Club, but haven’t deployed anything to the 360 yet. I’m currently staying at my parents’ home so the network setup doesn’t make it easy for me to connect a 360 with ethernet cables. I did start porting over WildBoarders to a 360 project, and it’s proved to be rather interesting. Some of the libraries I used had to be rebuilt as 360 projects, while parts of the game code are going to have to be redone because some features I used don’t exist in the 360 .NET version. That’s the easy part anyway. WildBoarders was started in XNA Beta 1. As a result, I had to code my own little resource management system along with some custom loading code for the maps. I now have to fully convert the system to use the XNA content pipeline since the 360 XNA .dll is missing Texture2D.FromFile(). I used that function for loading assets from binary map files that were, in turn, loaded into memory first. So I guess I’ll have to write a custom pipeline importer to load 2D textures from memory streams. WildBoarders on xbox 360 before New Years? A possibility.

In other news, I’m still working on the camera tutorial. I finished most of the code last night and it’s a fully functioning system that can move, scale, and rotate. I just need to add one more feature, and then I can sit down and write a tutorial that’ll hopefully be easily readable by XNA beginners. It is going to involve some basic Matrix and Vector math, but there really isn’t any way to avoid it. On the bright side, it could be used as a good primer before you delve into full-blown 3D math . I decided to enter the Great Games Experiment beta. This community that Garage Games is building is looking to be very cool. The whole system makes it very easy to release new games, chat with gamers, developers, and publishers alike. Exciting indeed. That’s about all I have for this update. I’ll be back around the 27th or 28th, and during that time I will have limited internet access so expect some delays in responses to e-mails. Happy Holidays!

XNA Game Studio Express 1.0 and TorqueX came out. I gave it a spin and looked at a few of the starter kits. Torque is a rather complex beast so I didn’t get too far with it for the time i spent with it, but it looks promising.

On the topic of WildBoarders, I’m releasing version 1.0.1 today. This version runs in XNA 1.0 and is simply using the updated Farseer Physics Engine. This fixes a lot of the major gameplay issues with bouncing and smoothness over the terrain. In addition to the binary release, I am releasing the source code as-is for WildBoarders 1.0.1. Hopefully it’ll help those looking to make similar 2D scroller games and can use this as an example. Keep in mind, there’s some areas you probably don’t want to use as an example as this was made for a competition and somethings were last minute throw-together code. You can also find it in the Code Archives section of my site.

Regarding future work, I’ll be picking up WildBoarders and polishing it probably sometime in January. I’d like to finish a few other things prior to that. One of those is the camera tutorial for XNA, which I’ll be redoing. After finishing WildBoarders I found there’s a few design problems with the camera system tutorial and I’d like to address those. While the first tutorial was a very light-weight camera system (which wasn’t the version used in WildBoarders, but similar) I’m going to go ahead and make a fully functional 2D rendering system with layers, camera control, and animation. I’ll be releasing parts of the series as I finish each section. So stay tuned for those popping up on my site. I finished writing the framework last night so it shouldn’t be long before the first part is up, hopefully.

Sure, this game is not going for sale or being published or whatever. So it wasn’t the complete game development cycle, but there was still plenty to learn. This is my 2nd complete game released, so I’ve still got a ways to go . But I figured I’d at least run through the motions and write a detailed postmortem. Read on for the details…

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Howdy! It’s been a while since my last post. I’ve been rather busy in the last week finishing up WildBoarders for the competition. It’s uploaded and ready for download now. The game was created with XNA Beta 2 over two months. Go check it out along with all the other cool games in the contest entries section at xbox360homebrew.com. It has been a fun two months developing a game from the ground up. I’d like to thank Adam for his amazing art and helpful suggestions during the development phase, and for sticking around during those last few days to ‘get it just right’ for release. There’s still some work to be done, but for now I’m taking a break and going to enjoy the upcoming holiday.

When I finally recover, I’m going to work on polishing up WildBoarders for a few months in my spare time before going full speed ahead on my next project. There’s still alot of stuff I didn’t get to and was hoping I’d be able to fiddle around with in the 2D arena (particularly particle effects and shaders). Also some of the levels could use a little clean up as a few sections were ‘rushed’ to get it complete for the deadline. Not to mention sound could use a little work also. I don’t think I’ll go through the trouble of maintaining patches and such as I’ll probably just update the main download file and adjust the version number.

 XNA Game Studio Express 1.0 is out! So hopefully in the next couple of weeks I could possibly get this ported to 360 to see how it runs, and also update this release to work with XNA 1.0. I’m sure there’ll be some changes needed in the code (particularly for widescreen support on the 360) to get it to run properly. In the meantime, I’ve got some code clean up to do and some gaming to catch up on (Oh how I miss you Zelda).

Later.

So this week is the final week of the xbox360 homebrew contest. I can’t wait to see and play all the games to be released this weekend . I wrote up the final dev blog post before the due date on Monday. I had an issue getting XNA games to run on typical user machines, but was able to resolve it thanks to another fellow game developer in the contest! It seems rather weird, but fortunate, that my editor and game has kind of hit ‘critical mass’. What I mean is in the editor it is now a pleasure rather than a pain to do a level. And as for the game, all of the hooks, callbacks, frameworks, etc are in place so now if I need to add something it’s simply just adding a class and inserting it into the correct update loop. So development is speedy as ever. Last night I created a whole finished level in a couple of hours, rather than days. So that’s progress, if anything. Not only that, but due to some art pipeline improvements and refactoring in the edtior, I’ve increased memory efficiency by a lot.

I’m still trying to keep my project plan for WildBoarders as up-to-date as possible. At least it covers what has been done, while things that still need to be might not be listed on there yet (I keep a hard copy list). The contest is winding down but the work needing to be done isn’t. I may start posting a bit more frequently until the 9th to update on my daily progress if I have the time. Until then, see-ya.