Wow! GTA4 is an awesome game! The amount of content in it is mind-blowing. It seems whatever gta4 lacks in gameplay departments it makes up for by sheer quantity and quality of content. It was pretty sad when I spent 20 minutes in gta4 watching TV. Watching TV inside a video game…wtf…that’s a new low for me. As if being a couch potato or an eccentric gamer wasn’t ‘bad’ enough. It just goes to show the brilliance of gta4’s design....
Functioning off of very little sleep in the last 48 hours… But finally got a good lock on what game I’ll be designing and developing in the coming months. More news on that in the upcoming weeks! My head is still spinning as I’m trying to pick up WPF, Open XML, Linq, and a host of other new technology/concepts for the last couple of days for a project at work I’ve just been assigned to....
I always knew that your state of mind affects your productivity. Had a pretty rough week last week and work on my prototype suffered for it. But in the end, I realized time was a-wasting. You have to keep at it regardless of how you feel that day/week/month, because at the end of the day no one is asking you to do this. I never doubted that working on indie games would be difficult and you should approach it just like any other serious job, but it’s now becoming clear how to approach it....
Going onto my 4th prototype this coming week. One thing I’ve quickly realized is if I want to make a decent game that has enough depth to warrant as a full game then trying to crank out a prototype in a single week is unrealistic. With my current work schedule plus life’s many other challenges, the average 10-15 hours a week I invest wouldn’t be enough. I’m ‘redefining’ my time schedule to mean ‘total time spent on a prototype shouldn’t be more than week’s worth’....
So far the new year is working out A-OK. I’m about 60 hours into developing my new game framework and 5th prototype for my next project. For those that are curious, it is being written in Blitzmax. Why? well it’s a straightforward language that is also pretty easily extensible, should the need arise. I’ve used Blitzmax’s predecessor for about 2 years, and I’m familiar with it. What more reason do I need?...
Yawn! Man, I’m tired but can’t fall asleep. Just finished my first play session on Gunstyle on the Xbox 360 a few hours ago with a friend (2 player split-screen). The day before I finally got split screen working fully (up to 4 players) with the exception of the in-game HUD. Overall, we had a good laugh and the rounds were exciting, but I’m not satisfied with the controls :|. Since a big part of Gunstyle is movement, this creates a poor gameplay experience....
After a lot of tinkering I got split screens functioning in Gunstyle. TorqueX supports split screens natively so i expected it to work rather simply, but due to some modifications and how Gunstyle game code worked on top of TX it complicated things a bit. Below is just a screenshot of two player screen shot on “Fool’s Paradise”. This is also working on Xbox 360. I am going to have to optimize some load times as they are drastically longer on the 360 (particularly loading assets initially on start up)....
It has been a while since I’ve talked about Gunstyle so I figured a post was due on the status of the game… Right now development is rather slow just due to our busy college schedules. It’s also the last 90% so it’s always tough ;). Right now Gunstyle is a PC only title due to it being a multiplayer centric game (XNA 1.0 lacking networking functionality on the 360). Personally, I’d love to see Gunstyle on the Xbox 360 and take it in that direction, but I guess it’s more of a ‘wait and see’ right now until XNA 2....
Hey again! Two updates in less than a month! Wonder if I can keep this up :). Anyway, just finished another article for Ziggy’s site. This one shows you how to do those cool, seamless ribbon trails you sometimes see trailing behind melee weapons (swords, sticks, etc) and other objects. I’ve also included a sample with full source code that works on both the PC and Xbox 360. So go check it out!...
Wow it has been a while! School is back into full swing so I’m spending time at school and in labs longer than should be legally allowed :|. I managed to scrounge up some spare time to write up this distortion shader article and some explanation of how things work for Ziggyware.com. Go check it out! Feedback is welcome as I’m still somewhat new to the world of shaders. Below is an example picture of the post-process shader in action....