04
Jan
So…pwith.
I just realised I start nearly every entry on this blog with ‘So….’. I’m not going to this time.
Firstly, congrats to Alex for winning the Developer’s Contest at Xbox 360 Homebrew! I checked his game out and it rocks, love the art style, go play it!
It’s been a few weeks since I decided that a remake of Sopwith II was going to be my next project, a step back in ambition so I can get my head around XNA a bit better. This is the game I should have entered the 360 Homebrew contest with.
I decided to approach this game slightly differently than I have in the past; previously I’ve been trying to get a perfect architecture in place, either by developing it as I go or by planning it out beforehand, and it really hasn’t worked for me as I get bogged down in what functionality should be put where, how the interfaces should work, blah blah blah, and I just go completely off it.
So for this project I decided: screw it! I’m going to forget everything I learned about good object-oriented code and just put stuff where I think it should go, and if it messes up some later functionality, I’ll just refactor the whole lot. OK, so maybe not forget everything, but I’ve at least stopped trying to build the perfect architecture.
Guess what? It’s working great! In the past week I’ve pretty much built the game up to a point where it’s completely playable, with a HUD and a splash screen and an end condition. That’s the furthest I’ve ever got with a game! It’s actually really fun too, I have to stop myself from just messing around blowing things up.
The next step is the sound effects, which I haven’t looked at yet but I’m fairly confident I’ll be able to get that implemented reasonably quickly. I’m going to have at least 1 and a half full days available to work on this before I go back to work, so I’m really hoping I’ll get the whole thing done to a releasable point. (So then I’ll just have to figure out how the hell you deploy a game, another stage I’ve never got to before)
Anyway, I’m having a whole lot of fun with it and I thought I should put something up here because I don’t update it enough, and I think at least one of my friends might visit it occasionally.
Here’s some screenshots of the current stage (most graphics are temporary programmer art… soon to be slightly better, more permanent programmer art):
Next Steps: Implement Sound Effects, Birds (Flocking behaviours), Engineers, Multiple Map Support
