Deep Blue on the 360

I signed up for the XNA Creators Club 2009 game contest, if for nothing else than to get the free 12-month trial XNA membership. Deep Blue would most likely not be something I would enter into a contest like this but getting the trial membership enables me to once again run Deep Blue on our 360.

I was relatively surprised that deploying to the 360 went so smoothly. There were a couple of things that popped up as different than designed. The first of which was the color. It was much more saturated on the HD TV. Most of the time that would be a good thing, but I think it went a little overboard on the explosions. I'll end up darkening and desaturating the explosion sprite a little.

The other surprise was that all the graphics seemed to be stretched. If I remember correctly, that would make sense for the background and title screen, but not so much for the ship sprites. So I'll have to take another look at that and see what's going on.

Fun with particles

Moving along again. I've got bad guy ships exploding, a simple scoring system rolling and I just finished up a very helpful tutorial from the XNA site, by jFoss on creating a particle system. It was a lengthy tutorial, but well worth it. I think I managed to absorb about 75%-80% of it.

Tomorrow night may be time to turn a little focus back to the art side so I can get better looking enemies and particles in there.

The particle system tutorial is a part of the extra credit tutorials on the 2d game lessons.
http://creators.xna.com/en-US/education/gettingstarted/bg2d/ExtraCredit

Back at it

After five months off I finally have a little time to throw some more attention to Deep Blue. I'm experimenting with some alternative ways of doing ship design for the enemies, as well as still finishing out the programming of the core game mechanics. I'm putting the scrolling background on the back burner until I get the rest of the core game play worked out. And I've got to get the menu screen set up with buttons.

So...diving back in (sorry, I couldn't help it).