Weekly eye-candy

Managed to import some of the assets. Much more to come.

Integration(s) and weekly eye-candy

Integration with the Torque X Community version went alright, no problems here. Also started using art sketches. Replacing them with the final, coloured version should be very easy (provided that Torque X editor can handle such operation without crashing). Some weekly eye-candy follows:

"Attraction" beam?

Got another bunch of artwork, this time for Metropolis level. Not showing off everything, but have to tell you, it is going to look great. At the moment I am toying with the idea of adding another kind of beam that could be featured in my game. Next to the traction beam, the UFO could use "attraction" beam to strip clothes out of pedestrians, leaving, for instance that lovely lady wearing underwear and shopping bags only. I agree it is kinda low blow, but one have to think of the target audience as well, right?

Some good news and some bad news and than again rather good news

Game is progressing well in terms of the artwork. Got some fantastic sketches from Ben from http://www.piketoon.com/ - won't show you everything, just have a taste of what's coming:

I do prefer to work with the right artwork rather than temporary graphics, because it allows an early polish-optimisation (if I can call it that way). Essentially having this simple sketch inspired me with some code changes that hopefully will improve the game-play and player's visual experience in general.

The bad news for me, for some XNA users and for all Torque X 2D (or whatever the current name is) is that Microsoft is pulling out a new version of XNA - 4.0 which is NOT backward compatible with the current 3.1. More importantly Torque X 2D (or whatever the current name is) won't be supporting XNA 4.0. What it means is that I (and a few other peeps) will be soon royally f..ked with out existing project.

Good news is that there is a community 'movement' which is focused on:
a) fixing stuff that isstill  f..cked up in the Torque X 3.5.1.
b) porting TorqueX to the XNA 4.0.

So essentially there is hope. Will report on that more soon (once I get some decent sleep.)

(this time) it is all about the final polish

I have played quite a few indie games from xbox games marketplace recently. I only bought two of them! My criteria: innovation, visual quality, game-play quality, re-playability, existence of the global score list, quality of the artbox.

Anyway, I decided to go extra lengths in terms of the visual quality and implemented a few additional options for some extra effect. For instance the creature player can abduct has a theoretical number of 8 effects, 4 death and for abduction (here called suction) effects:

Why theoretical effects? Because these are just slots -all effects have to be still created. And that's all for this weekend, may you have a productive time!

p.s. something motivational to read: $40,000 Xbox Live indie game Lumi is worth playing (arstechnica.com)

We are Xbox enabled!

It took me good two hours of tweaking Visual Studio solutions to make the game build for XBox360, but now it runs on my console as well as PC! Initially I got approximately 0.5 FPS :/ As it turned out, XNA was throwing and catching exception in a tight loop (even in C++ catching exception in a loop wasn't good idea). Xbox360 version requires a specific component to be present, adding the following code to my Game.BeginRun() fixed the performance issue:

Components.Add(

   new Microsoft.Xna.Framework.GamerServices.GamerServicesComponent(this)

);

Obviously I plan to use this component, but perhaps slightly later, when the whole game is ready.

Tasks currently on my list:
- Add landing zones and enable setting landing sequence in case we get two or more landing zones on the level (e.g. Zone1, Zone2, Zone1 again)
- Add projectiles (Adding level called "volcanic dodge-ball" would be nice)
- Add destructible objects and characters (bloody splat I created initially is OK, but definitely not enough - SPLATALITY is a must)
- Add sound effects (this looks rather painfull at the momemnt, as TorqueX seems to have no support for sound and music)
- Add some GUI and level loading manager.
- Add some dedicated graphics - this may be the easiest part as Julian from something2play agreed to deliver some juicy artwork.

Once that's done, the game must be enhanced to pass peer-2-peer and Microsoft tests (including swapping controller during gameplay, removing memory cards during saving and so on).

It is still a long way to go.

Anyway. I managed to spend some time playing Indie games from XBox Games marketplace. Most of them lack proper polish - in terms of graphics as well as gameplay. As far as the latter is concerned I am not going to drop the ball - not gonna rush too fast!