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