Parade of Rain

Well, Nut Harvest is out to the public and so far it seems most that have tried it have enjoyed it. That’s always good to hear, considering it was just a toy-around game for my friends and I . Unfortunately, I know that it certainly won’t get as big of an audience as WildBoarders simply because it’s an XBox360 XNA exclusive. There just doesn’t seem to be a good venue yet to release Xbox360 XNA games. Sure, there are community sites on the net such is homebrew or gameprojects.com but they still seem to be focused on PC development or the ‘wanderers’ there simply don’t have creator’s club and it’s still not convienent to put games on the 360. Add in the fact that getting games on your 360 isn’t free, and your audience shrinks yet again. But I’m not that disappointed. Going into the project I knew what to expect. But now that it’s done I’m not sure I’ll be inclined to do another 360 only game for a while; at least until Microsoft comes up with an easier way to share games. Sure, I could do games that work on both systems (such as WildBoarders), but there still are some fundamental differences to the platforms in question that kind of limit my choices. For example, if I make a single player game then I really don’t have any reason not to make it runnable on the 360. Yet, once I get into the realm of multiplayer things start to diverge rather quickly. On the PC, multiplayer these days usually implies some sort of internet connectivity. This isn’t possible on the 360 (yet). It’s rare (at least in my experience) to have multiplayer games be played on the same computer. On the 360, multiplayer can mean split-screen, xbox live, or a combination of both! I designed Nut Harvest to be a multiplayer game where everyone is on the same screen. So I was presented with two choices. Make it playable over the internet or simply make it 360 only. Going the internet route would have increased development time, and at the same time the game simply would lose a certain social element of the experience (*click* “OMG I pwn3d joo” *click* on ventrilo doesn’t count). Playing next to your buddies just makes this particular game more fun since communication is part of the experience (players teaming up against others). So yea, that was my reasoning as to why I stuck with just doing a 360 version.

In other news, I’m rolling along with development for our entry for the Dream.Build.Play contest that is coming up. Downside: it won’t be done in as short amount of time as my prior games. Upside: more time = better game, right?….RIGHT? Well, let’s hope so . July 2nd is apparently the due date, and according to the design doc we have laid out we’ll need it all . I just finished coding the networking architecture for the game last week, and Martin has the custom physics up and running also. It’s possible to join servers and move around and such, but there’s still a ton of work to be done. Adam’s handling the art-side of things once again so I can focus along with Martin on the coding/gameplay. With that said, my blog entries might slow down over the coming months as school gets busier and the game gets closer to being finished. Don’t want to say anything too specific or talk about what’s planned for the game until we have something to actually show, so that’ll be atleast a month or so away. Anyway, now I got to go study for an exam and work on a CS project.

Today is the day I release a ‘release candidate’ for Nut Harvest. It feels so great to finish a game! Nut Harvest is for the Xbox 360 only. This game almost took longer to release than to actually develop! It started near the end of last December when I was over at friend’s house hanging out with some buddies. Of course, we were playing some games on the Wii and 360. We soon tired of the games we had because none of them had any easy and fun multiplayer games (ok the Wii does, but wii’ve played it to death). Then there’s games like Halo or Smash Bros, but not everyone in the room was a Halo killing machine or a smash bros ninja so it left some of us with just twiddling the joystick.

At that point, I felt compelled to make a game that we could all play together and have some fun with no matter the skill level. I wanted to make a game that was relatively simple and allowed for some interaction between players, and this is what I came up with. I think my friends got a kick out of playing a game that we had only talked about a day earlier, and on the 360 no less. XNA makes this kind of thing possible. The initial development of the game took around 9-10 hours. After 10 hours the game was fully playable with up to 4 players, but the graphics were just placeholders and animations (what little there needed to be) were nonexistent. I would guess total development time for this game would be around 30-35 hours. Over the course of the next month or so I’ve spent an hour here and there prettying it up with the help of Adam’s artistic abilities .

So after some polish and bug fixing I’m ready to release a game that has brought a lot of laughs and silly moments to my friends and I. I hope you enjoy it too! Ciao…

Get Nut Harvest!

P.S. Thanks to my friends Josh, Stephen, Miro, Adam, and anyone else I forgot to mention who helped with feedback and support

As you can see from the lack of updates, I’ve been pretty busy. Wrapping up Nut Harvest, which is a 360-only multiplayer XNA game. I’ve got a few minor fixes for WildBoarders to release in a patch once I’ve done some more testing. Plus another project I’m working on, you’ll here more about it soon . School work is bearing down on me as I’ve hardly had any time this past week to work on anything, much less play any games . Here’s a quick screenshot of Nut Harvest with 4 players. Gotta run!