The sound of a neglected blog

Well I fail horribly at blogging. Our game has taken quite a few different turns in the time that has passed. We ended up starting with a survival mode in which enemy ships constantly spawn and the goal is to last as long as possible. We also added in an arcade mode which has different spawns depending on the “round” the player has reached. We had a hiccup in progress for about a week as we converted the project to 4.0 but the code resulting from the conversion was much cleaner and better optimized. Recently I have been working on the code to save and load a game from a storage device connected to the 360. This could be the harddrive attached to the xbox or a memory unit such as a usb storage device that has been formatted for the 360. The tutorial on how to do this was abysmal. Even the 4.0 tutorial used outdated code that would case fatal errors. After a decent while lurking forums I found several solutions one being an obvious assembly reference I was missing. However I found that even with the reference, when I copied the project for the xbox it would need an addition reference available only when copied for the xbox. I have found no way to work around this as it seems to be a bug with IntelliSense, Microsoft’s implementation of autocomplete. That or it could be an extension assembly and not part of the regular framework assemblies. It shows up in the add reference under the .NET tab but only when it’s built for xbox. I’m worried this may cause issues when we try to package the game for release I will consult with the team tomorrow to see if they have any ideas. The saving uses a structure so we could potentially add a quicksave if we wanted however I’m not sure how large the file would be.

mobo fried

My motherboard on my laptop fried, how nice. At least its not something where i will lose any data but i can't access my work that i haven't uploaded and have had to rewrite it. The level class seems to be functional but it needs some way to determine "events" or progression in a level. For instance if the level contains an escort and the escort dies, we want the level to know that the mission has been failed

non linear level design

I feel a big problem with a lot of the newer games released is that the direction you need to go is always right in front of you. I miss being able to get lost in a level and exploring for a little bit, this doesn't mean that the player should have no idea where he is going, just that the next waypoint should be somewhere other than forward. Backtracking in a level is not always bad, especially if the areas change their behavior. if an asteroid field was easy for the first part of a mission because the player was fighting slow ships with no escorts, it could change to be one of the hardest areas after the player is faced with a swarm of small agile ships

sick

blarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrg

pseudocode

Began working on the main game screen for the space game. I've been fiddling around with different ways to implement levels without the enormous task of building a level editor and i feel that having a subclass of the level class that is a level "chunk" will be the best way. by having prebuilt "chunks" we can mix levels up fairly quickly without a whole lot of effort. they "chunks" will still be hardcoded but at least it offers a little bit of abstractaction

nom nom nom

Character Sprites, Howway!

stairs and such

There was a little loss of detail when i scaled things down but so far i think it looks pretty good. making objects look 3d in a 2d environment was something i overlooked as simplistic. When you only have a 50x50 box of pixels to work with, some things just have to kinda look like their representation, rather than looking exactly like it