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.

Christmas Lights...

I like Christmas lights, I really do. All bright and shiny, flashing and twinkling. They really set the mood for the holidays. However, putting the lights up may be one of my most disliked tasks. You dig out the box from the attic, open it up and pull out a huge ball of wires and bulbs.

No matter how well you TRIED to pack everything up the year before, it always ends up a mess. A mess you spend probably just as much time untangling, sorting, and testing as you do actually hanging the lights up.

"Deep Blue" right now is a lot like that ball of wires and bulbs. It's going to take a lot of untangling, sorting and testing to get things all straightened out. But I still believe that I will be able to get it all done, and when I do it will finally be done in a way that will be easy to adapt to and use in the future.

I'm studying the platform sample that was included in the XNA documentation at the moment. It's something I probably should have done, and would have done earlier had I know where to find it. Anyhow, I'm reading up on loading in an external file for level design and also still trying to encapsulate the classes in an intelligent and helpful way.

I'd say "cross your fingers" but at the moment, I don't think I need anything else crossed.

Another major restructuring

Crossing my fingers and toes as I'm about to hit the code with a great big sledgehammer with hopes that I can come out with a better structure...and not shatter the entire thing.

Major refactoring and encapsulation about to take place to improve the engine and lay a better foundation for the next game.

...here goes...

Slugging through

Currently still going through a series of studying other XNA games and tutorials and then revisiting code for "Deep Blue". At this point I don't think there's much of the original code left but that's probably a good thing.

For the record I guess it's worth noting my reference material up to this point...since I had no C# experience prior to this.

It would be hard to list all the online tutorials I've read through so for the moment I'll stick to the books.

XNA Game Studio 2.0 - by Rob Miles. A very basic good that was a good first look into XNA but falls a little short full production. It's a "friendly" read.
Beginning C# by Karli Watson - Lays the basics of C# in more tech terms than the book above but about half of it is reserved for .net and Windows apps. Thanks for Matt S. for letting me borrow the book.
Visual C# 2005 Step-by-step - byJohn Sharp. This one was actually paired up with XNA Game Studio 2.0. It too is a more serious look at C# and spends a little time with Windows apps. All in all it's very comparable to Beginning C#.

At this moment, I feel I've got a pretty good understanding of some of the basic concepts of C# but still lack how to tie everything together. Creating classes, moving a player around the screen and having him blow things up is working fine, but it still feels a like it's not 'put together' quite right yet. So, back to reading and reviewing.

A Few Underwater Facts

Finishing up an illustration commission has paused serious development of "Deep Blue", although I'm still able to get a little research and art done.

Here are some interesting bits I've learned throughout the course of the project. - 71% of the Earth's surface is covered by water.

• Bouyancy of an object underwater decreases as depth increases.
• We know more about the surface of the moon than the deepest parts of the ocean.
• Modern submarines create breathable oxygen by electrolysis of water.
• A fathom is 6 ft deep.
• Water shooting from a deep thermal vent can reach temperatures of over 750 degrees but the extreme high pressure keeps it from boiling.
• In extremely deep water sound travels at almost a mile a second, over 5 times the speed of sound in the air.
• Most scientists agreed that life could not be sustained at the bottom of the deepest parts of the ocean. They were proved wrong when two men saw fish swimming at the bottom of the Marianas Trench at 35,761 ft below sea level. That was in 1960. They sat on the bottom of the ocean for 20 minutes before starting the 4 hour trip back to the surface. That was the last time anyone has been to the bottom.

If nothing else, I'm learning a lot about the ocean and underwater technologies.

In-Game Screenshots

New in-game screenshots from "Deep Blue" have been added to the web album. This is the first look at the user interface...most of it at least.