| Perfil de TylerAwake Late {-}FotosBlogListas |  Ferramentas  Ajuda |
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02 de fevereiro Long overdue Well, its been a long time since I've posted anything. Needless to say the Dream-Build-Play competition is long over and the results announced. Rocketball did well, taking the general 3rd place in the competition. It was exciting to meet the XNA team, meet all the other really talented developers making great XNA games, and in general, just relaxing in Seattle for a few days. When we got back from Seattle, it was decided to shelf Rocketball. There were a few reasons behind this, but the main ones were market competition. At the time, 3 other dogdgeball games has been announced (one pitting a pirate against a ninja) and it really didn't make sense to add another dogeball related project to what would be a saturated market. Though I can say this now, time has told that those announced games are now nothing much like Rocketball. I can't say we'll ever pick it back up (though never say never) but it sure was a great game to work on a a whole lot of fun. With that behind me, I've been writing a few articles based on our experience. I hope to have them done shortly. 03 de agosto Dream Build Play top 20 announced - Rocketball makes the cut!I can't tell you how well the rest of my day went after we found out the good news. The waiting and nervousness is gone! Rocketball has made the cut for the top 20 XNA games for the Dream Build Play competition. Only a few more weeks until they announce the 'winners' at Gamefest 2007, though everyone who entered did a heck of a job. I'll write more once I get back from celebrating and relaxing. Good luck to everyone in the next round! 29 de junho Final days of Dream Build Playwith only 4 (technically three full days) left before submissions are due for Dream Build Play, things are heating up. With some of the entrants so far that have been kind enough to post their games on the XNA creator's site, its looks like the competition will be pretty stiff. I'm glad though to see so many people behind the indie development of console titles. Our team will be working over the weekend to put on that layer of polish. I have to say I feel much better about where we are today than where we were last week. Each step along the way, I've said "well, if we have to ship with this I'd be ok with that", and then David (our programmer) says, "naw, we can make it better. I can get [feature x] in!." We have gotten to point where we can tune most of our major mechanics and we are no longer guessing as to whether or not they are fun. It's now all about balancing for a great gameplay experience. I think we can directly attribute our current position to our constant focus on the game and mechanics over graphics early on. It ensured we didn't get here and have to scramble to put in 'the fun' and then just hope the first pass would cut it. We have some solid tunable mechanics and thats about the only reason I'm not pulling my hair out. It's going to be a sleepless weekend (no one likes to crunch), but come Monday it will be all down hill. The 4th of July here in the states will also be a great break from our day jobs. Again, best of luck to all entrants! 21 de junho Dream Build Play - 11 days away...The XNA Dream Build Play contest is drawing to a close. With only 11 days left I think our project is on track, with the usual uncontrollable variables. I'm really impressed with how much the team has accomplished, and in such a short period of time. XNA has proved to be a great platform for quickly prototyping a game for the Xbox 360. All that aside, we have a few small hurdles left before we are done. After 11 days, It's out of our hands and the waiting game begins. Best of luck to everyone, it looks like it will be a close one... 02 de maio Cross-platform XNA projects (Xbox360/Windows)If you're using XNA Game Studio Express to make your very own game, at some point you may have wondered how you could make your project cross-platform. Though there isn't a built in way to do so, creating a cross-platform project that shares the same files is pretty easy. The Scenario: You're making a game targeted at the Xbox 360 but you'd like to build and test the project as much as you can on the Windows platform. For starters, get a USB (corded) Xbox 360 controller. That way you can use the same controls on the the PC as you can on the 360. This will also ensure you have less (if any) code to modify to get your project to run on the Xbox 360.
Thats it. Now you have a project that you can run on both Windows and Xbox. 30 de abril XNA Dream Build PlayThe team and I have been hard at work on our Dream Build Play entry for about a month now. Things are really just starting to pick up some steam. Work on the engine is underway as well as building a quick pipeline for getting content in to make the iterative process as fast as can be. Up until now we have been heavily focused on getting most of our art content done because there was very little to figure out in that area. Now comes the hard part and thats iterating and tuning our gameplay, something I think everyone wishes they had more time to do. I'll just be happy when I can start talking about our project and sharing some media. On another note, one incredibly nice thing with XNA is how easy the transition from XNA GSE to the Xbox 360 is. I was incredibly (and pleasantly) surprised as we began pushing builds of our game to the 360. Because most our engine input and our game is targeted at the 360, all of our input handling has been focused on the controller, and we didn't need to modify any of our code to get the current build to run on the 360. The time it takes to bake content for the console wasn't too bad either. This makes it really easy to tune values, add content and test in a short amount of time. |
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