Making Progress

Mr. Montgomery's solution seems to be working. After commenting code and excluding classes throughout the project "Deep Blue" is up and running again. I've got a logo screen, splash screen, main menu, game over screen, and the beginnings of the main game screen complete with controllable MANTA ship.

The work ahead still looks pretty daunting if I step back and look at the whole thing in it's entirety, but plugging things in one little step at a time hasn't been too bad so far.

I just hope all the extra time it's cost me on "Deep Blue" will be worth it (both for the completion of Deep Blue and for the next game...themed around the same engine).

Back at it, with a new strategy

Ok, so although I've had a rush of other things that have popped up...like Cub Scouts and Scribblenauts...I have to say I've been a little discouraged with "Deep Blue". I had the goal of breaking the game and restructuring it, then putting it back together. Well, I managed to do the first part reeeeaaaally well. Maybe a little too well.

I've had trouble finding a way to approach "fixing" the code. I begun following the flow of the game from the beginning and fixing things that were broken along the way, but with the whole thing a wreck it made it impossible to compile and thus, test.

Then I tried looking at the debug code and fixing things one class at a time, beginning with the class with the least amount of errors. I found it proved very hard to tell if I was making progress or not. Again, without the ability to compile, it's hard to get a good feel for progress.

I THINK the restructuring was going pretty well. It definately cleaned up the main game class a ton, but I had no way to test.

So I spoke with a couple of friends at work skilled in programming and Mr. Jim Montgomery (honestly one of the most impressive sounding names at work, you really have to say the whole thing) suggested commenting virtually everything out in the main game class, just to get the game to compile and slowly turn things on one piece at a time.

So that's was the new plan. Even if I had to comment it down to a blue screen, I was going to get it to run again.

After my initial tests, things seem a little better than the worst case senario...after a ton of commenting I've returned to a logo screen, to a splash screen, to a menu screen (and the menu still works). And now begins the slow process of turning things back on and fixing as I go.

Sucker Shark

Initial 3d model of an enemy tentatively called the "Sucker Shark". They travel in packs, are quick and agile and attach themselves to the players ship sucking the oxygen out of it.

The oversized reflective eye is required for the deep sea low light environment.

The new book has arrived

The new xna book I ordered has finally arrived and I'm definately going to have to step up my progamming skills to put it to use but it looks like it will be very help on many fronts. I really like the way it's presented, in a "problem/solution" type of manner. It definately wasn't designed to be read through in a linear manner. It's more bite-sized bits of programming.

The majority of the book seems to be centered around 3d games, which will come in handy later, but there are also several lessons or segments on things I've been wondering about for "Deep Blue", such as save game states, game components, and signing in to xbox live.

So I'll be reading through sections this weekend.

Good 'n Broke

Oh yeah, she's good 'n broke now captain.

And I now have a plan "A" and "B". Plan A: is I continue trying to straighten things out as is (a plan that's taking much long than expected). Plan B: I've got my new XNA book coming in and maybe I'll find something that will help and make things click in there...but that isn't supposed to arrive until the next Friday :(

So, back to plan "A" for now.

Purchased a new XNA book

Just ordered a new book from Amazon: "XNA 3.0 Game Programming Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach (Expert's Voice in XNA)"

The bad news is, it's not going to get here before my extended Memorial Day vacation is over. Whenever it gets here I guess we'll see if I've graduated past the "beginner" XNA developer stage.

Working on more concept art at the moment centered around the game's story.

Stone Squid Animation

Here's a look at the initial animation test for the heavily armored "Stone Squid".

I has no ranged attack but instead rams the player with it's heavy protective forward shell.

(rss feed folks may have to follow this link to view the video http://deepbluexna.blogspot.com)

Music is excerpt from an original piece for the game.