Enemy Ship 2

Fresh on the heels of the armored enemy ZBrush design is this second enemy ship. This ship, which is still unnamed, is much smaller and faster than the bulky armored ship. It's oversized claws are inspired by the real-world "Pistol Crab" which can essentially create a sonic burst with it's claws so powerful it actually creates LIGHT and stuns it's prey (soon to be dinner) from a distance. Seriously, I'm not making this up, search for it online.

Anyhow, just like the Pistol Crab, the claws here are an excuse to have a ranged weapon. Yes, the first of our bad guys that actually fires back at you.

All Hail 4-Day Weekends

Thanks to the 4th of July, I've got a 4 day weekend and I'm determined to make a good amount of headway on "Deep Blue". I'm currently finishing up the main menu screen and dealing with resolution variations for different TV's .

I'm pretty much cycling through the following steps: program something, play/debug, then review for clean up.

Some of this C# must be sinking in because the amount of "what the heck was I thinking!" during the review process has gotten much less frequent.

Soon I'll turn back to design, user interface specifically, and story. I'm not looking for an epic backstory here, just a little something that makes a little sense for what you're doing underwater.

But for now...off to July 4th barb-b-que and fireworks.

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).