And The Game Kept A Rollin' All Night Long

Just a quick update since it's been a little while. Progress continues, if a bit slowly over the last few weeks. Between Guild Wars 2, helping out in XNA Chat and general Laziness, not too much has been accomplished but there HAS been progress.

I've added in a few more monster types, cleaned up quite a bit more of the Vita code, added a splash screen and several other minor tweaks under the covers.

Hope to have more soon, maybe even an updated demo! For now, I'll leave you with a couple more screen shots off of the Vita build:

Heroes of Eterna on Vita! This Could Work!

A few weeks back I made a post mentioning the potential for HoE to run on a Vita using MonoGame/PlayStation Mobile, and another outlining some of the issues. Today, I'd like to share that progress on that front has been staggering! After spending a couple of evenings running down some issues, I can proudly report that the game is running at almost full steam on a Vita!

Heroes of Eterna: Now on IndieDB!

This weekend marks a couple of neat milestones for Heroes of Eterna!
First, we have the creation of the IndieDB entry for it (found here). This is a pretty big step for me as it gets the project out into the real internet world, beyond the confines of this unviewed blog.

Next up we have the first official demo release! I spent the early part of the weekend polishing it up for the masses and have released it, with a fancy new installer! You can find the demo here.

For anyone interested in such details, I used InnoSetup, which is pretty great, to create the install package. For you other XNA devs out there looking for an installer system that lets you conditionally install the XNA runtimes, this couldn't have been easier to set up. I found an excellent InnoSetup script by one Daniel Truong that I only needed to fiddle with a tiny bit to get working. You can find the script here.

A very tiny game!

So, last night over in XNAChat, a conversation led to someone mentioning having used 93 lines of code for a fairly trivial sounding task. This led to someone claiming that they'd seen games written with less lines than that. This, of course, I interpreted as a challenge, and got to work.

 Took a few of the sprites from the CQX project, hacked about for a couple hours and, 91 lines later, we have mission completed!

You can try the project out here, and if you want to see the terrifying code I came up with, you can look here.

Speaking of CQX; I've nearly finished refactoring the game state management system. Won't be long before it's functionally back to where it was with MUCH more maintainable, usable, extensible code. Stay tuned for more updates!

CQX Progress Update.

Progress on the Casual Quest XNA port has been coming along rapidly since project start a few weeks ago. Data driven class, baddy and skill systems are all built and functioning. Collisions with the map are fully implemented for both players and monsters, while rudimentary collisions with skills is in progress and partially working. In game chat is also working at this point.
The project is officially greenlit by the original creator, and I have the support of the current maintainer of the BYOND version. Things are looking pretty good so far, let's hope it continues.

Network Framework up and going

So, using the Network Library RakNet, I've been able to get some semblance of a Client/Server setup going.
Currently Joining a server, toggling ReadyState, and multiple users mulling about on a map are implemented.

Need better handling of Client Disconnects (Should attempt to immediately reconnect once or twice before dropping altogether), as well as Drop In support (Join while a game is running). Perhaps more importantly, there needs to be some actual GAME (No monsters spawn, or anything like that yet). There's no prediction or interpolation, so it'll be pretty susceptible to lag, and in general, there's a lot to do. But hey, Progress!

New Project!

This one is already Designed and Arted up, in fact if you've been around the BYOND community you may have heard of it:

Still in the early stages of development, but progressing nicely. Currently the Networking code is under the lens. More updates as I have em!

A quick post to show a video!

Hurrah! A new video! Groundwork has started for weapon types that don't actually fire bullets, as well as animated weapons. The vid shows off the RockSaw a new WIP weapon which will be able to dig through, you guessed it, rocks (It also shows the other weapons off too).

It's starting to look like a game!

It's been quiet in here lately, and for a few reasons. I've been hooked pretty hard by Terraria lately. It's a remarkably entertaining little gem, and impressively, is an XNA title. But I've also been coding.

For one, I started porting Alpha Blasters over to XNA 4. Most of the immediate compile errors have been cleaned up, but the storage framework seems to have changed completely, requiring a rewrite of the save system. Another time perhaps.

I've also been working on the current project (Which I've codenamed "project 0" for no good reason). I've gotten some art from the artist, and it's looking swell. Have a handful of new dirt tiles to use, so I built the framework to build the terrain by randomly placing them, works and looks great =D. I've also gotten the first pass and basic game state management wired up with some help from the XNA samples over at the App Hub. I also finally got around to wiring up XACT. I have a few songs for use, and some first pass SFX as well. The game mode system is more or less setup, and kills/deaths/respawn has been implemented.

There's still a lot more code to write, and a lot more assets to be built, but it is starting to take a basic shape. I'll be putting together a video soon but, for now, here's a screenshot:

P.S: This also still works flawlessly on Xbox 360 (Better even, as player 1 & 2 can both play).

Progress update!

It's been sorta quiet around here lately. I wish I could say it's just because I've been busy coding, but I can't as it's only about half true (see, I found League of Legends and it's quite the distraction). BUT! There has been some heavy code work done and things are moving along quite nicely.

I've started, and progressed a good ways toward, building a GameManager to handle all of the Specific game rules (e.g. time limits, kill limits, how many players etc...) as well as handle drawing the game and it's UI objects. It's mostly functioning at its basest level but there's still plenty left to do. Bullets now collide (and do damage to) other entities (not just dirt). There's a rough lifebar and rougher still UI block. The zooming camera has been fine tuned and now works brilliantly. There's also been some heavy code re-factoring (basically pulling out a bunch of junk placeholder code and replacing it with more functioning stuff where it actually needs to go).

More updates to come as I have them. For now, I leave you with a new ScreenShot!

New Video!

I've made some progress with the weapon and digging system, and even gotten a cool new little avatar to user.
here's the new vid, Be sure to watch it full screen at 720!

 

And for good measure here's a screenshot showing off both 2x Zoom and a mini-map that came along with Tuesdays camera work for free! 

WEAPONZ!

Oh man, my overly complicated data driven weapon system works beautifully, and on the first try!

Still a long way to go but progress is happening!
Here's a video!

2d Physics are hard.

Boy are they kicking my ass... I can get things working halfway for one piece and then the other piece fails in a cycle of doom. However, I have a plan and I'm going to implement it in the next few days. The internet is rich with resources and with their help I might be able to get this troubling piece accomplished.

More to come.

Random updates.

Well since GameSpy is out of the question I looked around a bit and found RakNet. Turns out it's also free for us indie devs as well. What's even better is that they've done most of the hard work for us. Included is the support, setup, and documentation for using Swig to wrap the C++ dll's up for use in .Net. So yay! Windows Networking support without having to roll everything from scratch!

On that note I have a small side project used as a testing bed for learning that piece, more on that later.

The main project is progressing, if slowly. Got tunnel shadows implemented with remarkably little work, and it looks pretty good too.

GameSpy Technology And XNA?

So recently I discovered that "GameSpy Technology" had opened up and is now free for us indie type devs.
So this begs the question, can we XNA developers make use of this techology for our windows projects and, if so, how many hoops would we have to jump through to get the C libraries working in our managed C#?

A thing to ponder on certainly. I plan to dig into this mystery here soon and will report back any progress.