Well this time around I actually found the time to join the XNA7Day challenge. Since the challenge was to make a game that only renders text, I went with the first thing that came in mind when dealing with ASCII only output – a roguelike game. There was a few things that I would have liked to have included – but this week and weekend ended up being pretty busy, if nothing else I at least finished the task, not 100% sure how balanced it is (some games i plow through everyone, some games i get destroyed right away) but it was a fun little challenge at least.
Granted if this was a competition rather than a friendly challenge – I would probably be blown out of the water – one of the other participants threw up some screenshots of their game in progress an ASCII FPS – which makes my silly roguelike look like childs play.
In any event looking forward to seeing what everyone comes up with, and hope I have time and ideas to enter future challenges.
I picked up a few games recently, and upgraded to Windows 7 which so far I have been pretty pleased. I might be an easy sell though, I am one of the few that didn’t really hate or complain about vista. Speaking of games though Modern Warfare 2 is calling my name – I know everyone has been playing it nonstop and has all ready hit level 5 billion or whatever, but I just picked it up earlier today…so the adventure begins.
Well as I posted before I have had a bit more spare time lately – and with it I have been playing some new games (Uncharted 2 is a beauty, and starting to get into Borderlands) but also playing around with XNA still – I just can’t seem to let the dream die I guess. Last time I played around with XNA i created a pretty basic game of Solitaire. Nothing to write home about really, but it was a fun little adventure. I never got to the point I would have gone out and distributed it on Xbox Live or anything, but I somewhat considered it. Ironically before I ever got that far, I was stopped dead in my tracks, granted there was nothing stopping me from continuing to release my game even though there had just been a Solitaire game added to the marketplace, I mean just look at how many vibrator….er Massage games there are out there, but I would rather build something unique that wasn’t all ready available – if at all possible.
I had a few more ideas, and I started to notice a bit of a pattern. I started a project similar to Battleship – not long after came this, I thought of making a card battle type game something like pokemon, magic etc – and then this came out. I thought of making some sort of pumpkin carving game for halloween – and quite of few of those popped up. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think these are ground breaking nobody could think of it ideas or anything, it was just somewhat comical the track record I was having. Finally I thought of something that I thought was somewhat unique and a little less likely to be released before I could get to it, a gunner where you play with both thumbsticks each thumb controlling a different ship. I cant find the article now, but sure enough two guys where working on the same kind of game and had a news story about it. Finally I saw the videos of the Dream Build Play contest this year, and my jaw dropped, it’s unlikely I could ever compete with some of those awesome looking games – and yet I still carry the torch continuing to dabble – and who knows maybe one day actually release a game for you all to play. If anyone is an artist the chances of that might get higher because I pretty much suck anything artistic or design
For the past month or so I picked up a new project, another one that probably wont ever get to the point of distribution, but just to keep my appetite wet, and my skills at least somewhat sharp in the XNA world. I started recreating a board game that I used to playe quite a bit as a child ‘Stratego’. Again not being graphically inclined at all, i started with what I did know – code, numbers, and logic, and the results of that is the image you see here, the beginning stages of my game. Maybe not the most logical way to start the game, as I am no game developer to say the least – but it worked so I went with it.
The most interesting thing about this image is – in this state the game was 100% playable. The rules were enforce -pieces could only move the places they were allowed to move, when two pieces touched the winner of the battle would stay, the loser would leave – and you could even win by getting your enemy’s flag. Not much to look at, and no AI at all, but functional.
Over time I have continued to tweak that starting point, throw some graphics on it, build an AI engine (to which I have to admit I had not a single clue how I was going to approach such a thing when i decided to tackle that task), and make things like pieces actually moving instead of a square changing from one piece to another. I have tweaked it a few times for performance, not that it was performing badly but I found that if I changed up a few lines of code, I could get it to perform even better, etc. In any event for those of you interested, here is a little screen capture video of the game in its current state.
Be warned, I know its not perfect, amazing, ground breaking, or any of those things – so dont bother clicking play if you are expecting to be amazed
I don’t know if I would call the game complete, I don’t know if I will ever complete it – however it definitely is the furthest along I have gotten when playing around with building a game completely from scratch to date. As I sit here I can continue to name things I could add to it – like make the AI MUCH better (its functional but pretty dumb at this point -but to be fair it did beat me a few times so far), fix up a few nuisance type bugs, add some sort of scoring mechanism, update it to be a 2 player networkable game….and on, and on….and on. Will I ever do those things? Perhaps, because its been a fun time thus far, or I might migrate onto one of those other projects I have in mind (that so far have not been released) and use what I have learned in this adventure towards the next.
Well looks like after posting a single time I vanished for another almost 6 months again. I don’t really have a ton of things to report, which might be the lack of posting – just kind of living life as it comes at me. I mentioned my new job in the last post – and I am still there, sometimes its pretty intense with the number of projects have I have in the works and for multiple clients all at once – its an interesting juggling act, but it keeps me busy and pays the bills – so I can’t complain.
We bought a house in the early part of June, so a bunch of my time around then was packing, and moving – and bugeting, and all that fun stuff – but it was all worth it. We have quite a bit more room, lots of things to do with the kids, our own driveway and garage – etc. More recently I spent a pretty good chunk of my life installing one of those wooden playset things for the kids – the directions warned that it could take 8-12 hours or something like that, but I burned pretty much an entire weekend with the help of my brother on that one.
My contract work is on the lower side lately – mostly because I am busy with the family and being back to full time I don’t have time to hunt around for clients and work to do – but who knows that might pick up again soon. I have been using that extra free time to spend time with the kids – and then when they are sleeping playing games – and even playing around with XNA a bit still – not sure if I will ever go as far as to buy a subscription and release an Indie game on xbox live – but its always good to have a dream.
Ymiris, Ant, and I haven’t done the friendcast in ages – we really did plan on bringing it back to life – so you never know it might be back sometime in the near future, especially now that the weather is getting colder making it less likely we are out enjoying the fun and sun with our families. 360friendspot is still online however I don’t think anyone visits much anymore, I never really got any writers to take my spot when I couldn’t keep up with the day to day news, and at this point even the forums are a bit vacant. Somewhat said really, as we had a great crew over there, never huge – but all great people, I am happy that I can still be in contact with as many of you that still want to be in contact
Well maybe I will post again a little later (and much sooner…I promise) but I couldn’t believe how long it was since I posted, and felt like I should get SOMETHING out there to make sure everyone (those of you that care) know I am not dead…..at least not yet!
