Reading....analyzing....reading....analyzing

Slacking around? Off the job? No way. Even though I haven't had the change to post updates recently I'm still pretty heavily focused on "Deep Blue". Right now I'm doing a lot more reading on C# and studying a lot of code provided on the Creators Club site.

The funny thing is, it seems everyone has pretty much their own way of doing things. In all the samples I've looked at I have yet to see two people handle the structuring of the code the same. The good news is, I've managed to not break anything in all the refactoring going on. The bad news is, it doesn't look terribly different than a couple of weeks ago.

But since this is a learning exercise I'm not bound by any timeline and it is helping me get a much clearer picture of C# and XNA.

Conversion to XNA 3.0

Well I jumped in a little earlier than I originally planned to and converted "Deep Blue" from XNA 2.0 to XNA 3.0 and to my surprise, and relief, it was pretty painless. The only fall out seems to be a couple of warning messages during deployment which I'll track down pretty soon.

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).

3 Week Video - a Little Late

I got to reviewing the Deep Blue folder and trying to get caught up to where I last left off before I ran out of free time here and I found this video. The video shows progress after the first 3 weeks. I really have no idea why I didn't post it before, unless I was waiting to add one last clip of something.

But since I've now forgotten what that would have been, I'm going to go ahead and post it.

So, a little late...here's the video of where the game was/is after 3 weeks of development. I hope to be able to spend some more time on it in the not too distant future, but we'll just see how busy other things go.

Happy New Year All!

Ok, the holidays have now passed, like a hurricane...but that's a much longer post, and I'm going to try to get things rolling again with "Deep Blue".

We last left off with around 50 hours of work done which included a little of everything, art, documentation, even programming.

For the first post of the new year here's our look at the very valuable air tank pickup, both large and in-game size.