Ahh… What Could’ve Been!

Williams color vector hardware?? With VidKidz developing for it?! Oh man… like a wet dream!!

http://www.rotheblog.com/2010/01/arcade-history/williams-vector-prototype-schematics-found-illinois-pinball/

Levels, levels and more levels

Well, I saved the actual gameplay for last… which I tend to do for some reason. But now that the framework and supporting functions are done in Every Other Shooter, it’s now time to design and implement the 30 levels I have so cleverly named…

Seems that a combination of waved spawings along with both random and timer based spawning (for more specialized enemies) will be included in the level definitions. Once this is done, time to tweak enemy AI and get the game balance right.

In other news, our resident 3D maniac is hard at work on “Exodus”, our first FPS using the Unity game engine. It’s coming along rather nicely I must say! Has the dark tropical jungle feel of Turok going on… storyline is also being developed as I type this… more later.

Progress Report

Progress on our XNA twin stick shooter (yeah but ours kicks ass!) is coming along nicely… code cleanup last night and now working on the data files to store level information. Still need to finish the rest of the sprites as well. Shaune is working on some new sound effects and I’m tweaking some existing ones. He has also started to prototype our FPS project in Blender (using the internal game engine). Zaid is still working on a side project on the PC with an outside artist/musician which is a NES style action RPG but combat is performed through typing (think “Typing of the Dead”). So we’re mad busy… hopefully by years end we’ll have all these wrapped up and can start on some new ones!

Almost Here!! (GR+++)

Popped over to Yak’s blog and was pleasantly surprised to see that he is almost finished with the new 360 version of GR (tentatively titled “GR+++”). Looks great! In the meantime, don’t forget to pick up a copy of GR++ or Space Giraffe ($10 and $20 respectively) for PC:

https://www.llamasoft.co.uk/shop

Nostalgia: Carcharodon (Amiga)

Hmmm… yes another old title I couldn’t remember the name of, but here it is. Just your average horizontal scrolling shooter to be honest, but what I remembered about it most were the graphics. Back in 1991, this was one of the many titles that just showed why the Amiga was at the top of the gaming food chain.

getdata() and setdata() = bad!

I didn’t realize just how slow getdata() and setdata() are until last night, where I have both in a tight nested loop, needless to say, framerate goes out the window! And it’s worse on 360 supposedly… so time to reorganize my ChunkManager class. I guess I’ll have to pre-populate an array of “chunks” for each sprite when they are created.

XNA Platformer (on-hold), Arena Shooter = GO!

I convinced myself that to do our platformer justice, we would need more than the remaining 1 1/2 months or so afforded us before the DBP 2009 contest entry deadline. So it goes on hold as we put together an arena shooter style game loosly based on the old Amiga/Atari ST game “Wicked” (as mentioned in a post from last week). Progress report to follow…

XNA Quake 3 Library

This is pretty cool… since our own Ghosthands is a Q3A freak! (and we are as well)

http://www.codeplex.com/q3libxna/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=16497

Nostalgia: Wicked (Amiga)

Man, I couldn’t remember the name of this game for the longest time, but tonight I waded through all the game screenshots over at Lemon Amiga (http://www.lemonamiga.com/) until I recognized it… and there it was… “Wicked”! Not the greatest game in the world, but there’s something about it. It has a very dark and mysterious vibe to it, and I did actually enjoy playing it again after 20 years. Remake perhaps??

XNA Game Studio 3.1

Microsoft released XNA Game Studio 3.1 today. Some nice improvements. I am mostly interested in the audio enhancements (XACT 3 support, etc.) I’m going to migrate our platformer from 3.0 to 3.1 tonight and see how it goes.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=80782277-d584-42d2-8024-893fcd9d3e82