Here is a dev video of the XNA/XBLIG game I’m working on: “Cult Retribution”

The game is a vertical shooter with some light leveling and skill/stage trees. The art is being done by Shea L, mind you the current tilemap is something I made to test the tile engine. That will be replaced very soon.

It’s been quite a learning experience and the Willow engine has benefited greatly. I definitely agree with those who say that when you’re learning it’s best to start making games and develop engine features as you need them because with little coding experience it will be difficult to have enough foresight to plan for every feature you’ll need.

Here’s an update to the parallaxing background test I was doing before. I added a bullet manager, some collisions and “camera code” to keep the view on the player. I also went out and bought a xbox360 controller so I can start coding for its inputs and it is very nice.

Made a parallaxing background manager that takes in a vector from something (in this case the player) and alters the background.

I ran into trouble with the math when I wanted to get extremely small parallax scale values.

The art is done by Shea L.

Finished up Akumamatata the other night. This would be the first full library and game I managed to make without having to constantly resort to a book or reference somewhere. I’m finally starting to get a grip on XNA, at least the 2D portion of it.

Over the next while I’ll be doing a handful of 2D projects this time with original content drawn by me and some friends.

Anyways here’s a vid of Akumamatata, no download link of course for obvious reasons

As you can see I thought of a better name for the game than “Akumas Quest”

Since the last version I’ve done the following:

-Added in collisions

-Added in an enemy and enemy manager class

-Added in scoring

-Added in a very hacked on FSM for the start menu

I’ve learned a ton from this project. One thing in particular is after starting to pass a lot of classes around it became very apparent why it’s good to make an interface for a class you only have one instance of then register it as a service. I’ve heard this is called the singleton pattern. Definitely seems to keep the code less messy since a lot of my classes need usually one or 2 things from another class.

One other thing to note is next time I do a game, I’ll make sure I have a very well thought finite state machine in place first. Trying to implement a decent FSM after the game was started proved to be too much of a burden.

You may notice there’s some diagnostic text in the top left, it’s telling you what state Akuma is in, whether a collision succeeded and whether the irrelevant enemies were removed from memory.

I still have to add some more gameplay code. The point of the game will be that Akuma must protect his stash of pizza and comics on the left side of the screen from increasingly difficult waves of enemies.

I’ve spent some free time int he summer studying C# and XNA in preparation for school and just for the fun of game development. Years ago I did some introductory classes in programming at college, mostly in c++. I did well gradewise but all the exercises were about fundementals like making linked lists and pointer management, basically all console programs. I coulnd’t quite grasp how that would come together to form a useful windows program, much less a game.

After getting back into programming through C#/XNA I’ve managed to stay a lot more motivated than before. The language has had the effect of making c++ more understandable. I’m looking forward to really getting into the guts of the SourceSDK eventually.

So I have today some video footage of what is actually my first 2 projects:

The first is LemurLib, a 2D platforming game library that currently handles texture management, cel animation (both snap and linear), input handling, and has a premade protagonist class so you can get a character running in game with only a few lines of code and a textuer.

The second is Akuma’s quest, a personal project full of lifted sprites that promises to be both terrible and blashphemous. In the video you have the basic player character moving around with a teleport for fast movement and 2 attacks. The background is a quick parallax hack that I plan to replace with a well thought out implementation for the library.

One thing I’ve learned from this so far is that I really should have included a play duration parameter when you submit an animation to the animation manager, relying on the animation to just play perfectly without any sort of time comparison doesnt seem to work very well.

A shot of a early version of Chilis Treat Quest

I have recently been reading Aaron Reeds XNA3.0 book for beginners without actually knowing C# to begin with. I have taken some entry level c++ programming nearly 7 years ago and my knowledge is rusty at best. Despite that, I’ve been having a blast going through the book and doing my own takes on his game projects. I did however order a few books from the same publisher Oreilly on the topics of C# so I can get to know some basics I’ve most likely overlooked.

I’m currently developing a game starring my cats Bug and Chili called “Chili’s Treat Quest”. It’s very similar to the first half of the XNA3.0’s 2D game project but I’m trying to do a few small modifications. Namely using different functionality for the sprites, nothing too far off at this point. For instance one enemy spawns and bounces around like a old screensaver until a certain number of bounces is met. At that point the sprite leaves the screen. Ideally I would like the number of bounces to be tied to the level that you’re currently playing but I haven’t gotten so far as implementing levels of difficulty yet.

I hope to have the game fairly complete by next week and then move onto a sidescrolling platformer type game in which my significant other will be doing the art for.