Initial Treatment

I took a day off from work and hoped to do a little catch up from the hours I wasn't able to work earlier this week but the majority of the day was taken up with Thanksgiving school activities for the kids and a car breakdown in the driveway.

The good news is, the car seems to be running ok now (knock on wood). But I'm not sure if it was foreshadowing of things to come.

I did manage to get the initial treatment for Deep Blue written. It's a 3 or 4 page document giving a high level view of the game. It's by no means a game design doc or spec doc, but it still helped to flesh out some of the basic concepts around the game.

Still a little behind where I'd like to be for this week but hopefully I'll be able to make some extra ground this weekend.

The new NXE Launches

Xbox launched it's "New Xbox Experience" yesterday, and I have to admit it's a pretty nice update, even if it lacks in originality. It's definitely the largest upgrade to date for the 360. It seems to be some sort of mashup of Apple meets Sony meets Nintendo.

The new avatar system is nice even if it seems to walk the middle ground between the Wii's kiddie Mii's and the PS3's more realistic Home avatars. The selections are pretty thin at the moment (a common theme in the XNE at the moment), but it's a nice start. We'll see how long it takes for the microtransactions to pop up to buy new clothing and accessories for your avatars.

I tested out the Netflix integration and although I found it a little odd that you do your movie browsing on the Netflix site instead of the 360 I must admit the quality and convenience of the whole system was nice. The biggest drawback at the moment is the very sparse list of good titles available.

Of course the one new feature I was most interested in seeing launch was the XNA community games. I was thrilled to see that it wasn't buried two or three levels deep in some dark corner of the dashboard. I was a little disappointed to find only two games available. After Microsoft just finished up their "Dream it, Build it, Play it" competition you'd think they would have at least a dozen or so games available. Then again, I'm big on the "quality over quantity" theory. Hopefully we'll see more game launch in the near future.

This Week's Mission

I know this probably should have gone up yesterday but I wanted set a few goals to get done by the end of the week, some bigger than others.

Last week I got a good deal of nervousness out of the way by getting a better start on the programming than I had originally anticipated. Honestly, and I risk cursing the whole thing now in saying this, but the programming side really hasn't appeared that bad. This week is heavier on the design end of things.

I'm shooting, no pun entended, to have the game backstory ironed out by Sunday night. Along with, vehicle designs for the player sub, at least one enemy, and any initial pickups designed. I'm also trying to get a game abstract put together for the base game mechanics and at least a roadmap to expanding things out once the foundation is laid.

All that makes for a pretty busy week given that I totally missed last night. But for the big "Bonus Points" I'd be thrilled to solve the mystery of the self moving player sub that refused to sit still at startup. A small victory would be solving the scaling issues with the screen backgrounds and getting some enemies swimming across the screen, even if they're not effected by anything.

Hmmmm....membership fees

So today I get hit with a reminder that I think XNA, as a program is great, but membership fees for XNA is a bit...well...odd. I recently read that Activision...uh make that Activision/Blizzard or Blizzard/Activision depending on whos really paying the bills, but anyhow THEY recently announced that they may actually try a subscription model with Guitar Hero World Tour's Studio content.

Let's get this straight, Activision is going to charge me a fee...for the privilege of downloading game content that they didn't even create. I figure that makes about as much sense as YouTube charging me to watch videos.

All this of course comes about because my XNA premium membership expired today. Let me restate that I really like XNA as a source of community generated games, but it still, in the back of my mind strikes me a little...odd...that I'm paying a fee for the privilege of creating games. Yes, the tools are "free", or maybe their not depending on how you look at it.

In any case, no more builds to the 360 until Thursday when I'll set up the next 4 months.

In other news I finished Halflife 2 on the 360 this evening. This was my third time through the game, but the first time on the 360.

Status - Week 1

Here's a short 40 second video showing the game as it stands at the end of one week of development. It's about 10-12 hours of actual developement time with this being a hobby and all...hey, a guy's gotta have a life.

This week was really all about getting started. Deciding on a game genre, concept and what the learning objectives are for the project. I'm approaching the project with an iterative design process and we'll see how that goes. Basically what that means is getting things rolling as quickly as possible and building up from those basics.

I've got a basic game concept, created some rough 2d assets, imported them into XNA game studio, set down some fundamental code for game flow, player movement and shooting, and I've even successfully sent an initial test build to my Xbox 360.

All-in-all, not a bad week.

Ship Thumbnails and Profiles

I thought I was going to get a little further today, but Rock Band 2 and Spore had other ideas. In any case, here's a couple pages of very quick ship sketches.



I focused primarily the ship profile since that's what the player will be seeing 99% of the time. I was also tossing around name ideas in my head and I think I'm going to go with "Deep Blue" for now. I know...it was the name of that chess playing computer but it sounded unspecific enough for a game that right now doesn't have many specifics about it. I like it because of it's unlimited possibilities (other than the fact that it sounds like it deals with something deep underwater).



With that in mind, I put together a few type studies for both title treatments and UI type. That helped narrow down the direction a little more. When I began I basically had three possible approaches to the look and feel of the game.
1) Targeted at Kids, fun, "happy bubble underwater game"
2) Arrggggg, "There be pirates!" approach
3) Sleek High Tech, "Seaquest 2010"

Based on the direction most of the ship profile sketches had taken and the fact that at its heart, it's an arcade shooter game, I veered away from the "Happy bubble" and "Pirate" games and more toward the "Seaquest 2010" look.

The good news is, this early on if something pops up and screams..."this just isn't going the right direction", it's not going to be too terribly tough to change.

First 360 Build

I sent a quick build to the 360, just to make sure everything was behaving as it should. From a programming checkpoint, everything checked out. However it's clear the 'safe area' on various TVs is going to have to be dealt with.

The take away is that I'll most likely be placing all the game user interface (UI) elements in relation to the borders of the screen instead of at hardcoded x,y coords. Just a little something to keep in mind during UI design.