Ben James :: adventures in gaming

It's been such a buzz having people actually playing my game! I've had a lot of positive feedback, which is fantastic, so I'm glad people are enjoying it. I've had a couple of requests for the source code so I'll consider releasing it, though I need to figure out what sort of license I should do that under. I assume it will be some sort of GPL thing, but I'm not quite sure how that all works.

I also want to comment my code a bit more before I release any source code, as it's pretty messy at the moment. (You know, I'm not even sure whether it's a good idea to release it, I'm sure my coding is nowhere near the proper way you should be doing things)

Anyway, I've started on my new game which is going to be an original design so I can hopefully enter it into Microsoft's Dream, Build, Play contest (anyone know when that's meant to be starting? It says January but they've only got a week to make that deadline) It's going to be a 2 player only game specifically designed for Xbox 360 controls (though I'll try to include PC controls as well, and of course you'll be able to play with a wired 360 controller).

No screenshots yet (not much to show), but I should get a chance to do some more work on it this week provided my DS doesn't take up too much of my time, not to mention the Crackdown demo which has nearly finished downloading. Of course, being that my game is full of programmer art, there's never much to look at anyway. If the game is turning out fun I may have to find somebody to partner with so I can get some decent art in there, but for now I'll just be working on getting it all together and working.

Wow, I wasn't expecting to have a release ready tonight, but I pushed through and I'm pretty happy with what I've got. There's only one map and there are still a few small things I was going to try to implement, but I'm impatient to get something out there so I'm calling this the 0.9 release.

If you want to try it out you will need the following software installed first:

• .NET Framework 2.0
• XNA Runtime Redistributable
• DirectX 9.0c

Once you've got those, you can:

DOWNLOAD SOPWITH XNA 0.9 (2.8MB)

Here are some screenshots to hopefully whet your appetite:

Please let me know if you come across any bugs or have any comments regarding the gameplay, this release is sort of a beta test and I would like to make this game fun to play. I've tried to include all the elements of the original Sopwith, plus added a few of my own, so hopefully that adds up to a fun little game.

If you want to try out the original Sopwith, or just read about it the best site for it is probably http://sopwith.classicgaming.gamespy.com/

Wow, I might actually get this game finished this week like I'd planned. I didn't get much done on Monday (I got sunburnt at the beach on Sunday, plus it was the first day of my temporary unemployment, so I was feeling a bit lethargic I guess), but yesterday and today I spent quite a few hours doing new graphics, implementing sound effects, implementing bird flocks, and fixing a bunch of fiddly bugs.

The main things left to do are the splash screens/menus (splash screens are working, just need to tweak them), end of map summary, game over screens, and a few extra graphical tweaks.

I've mostly solved the performance problems I was having with the collision detection, so it's running pretty smoothly at the moment, even when a bunch of stuff is exploding (with sound effects now as well!) All in all, I'm feeling pretty proud of myself, and I'm looking forward to actually releasing a game!

Here are a couple of screenshots of the latest build:

In other breaking news, apparently Neversoft are going to be working on Guitar Hero III in some capacity, which is kind of scary. I'm hoping they're just going to be doing the PS3 port and that Harmonix will be continuing to develop Guitar Hero III with the 360 as the main platform. Here's hoping Neversoft aren't taking over and if they are, here's hoping they don't screw it up.

So, I've hit the point in developing my Sopwith Clone where I'm starting to have performance issues when I run it. It started when I was implementing the machine gun fire, because it involves collision detection between a relatively high number of sprites.

I've been using Ziggy's Per-Pixel Collision Detection algorithm (slightly modified to account for animated sprites) to do all my collision detection, which has been working very well so far, but it looks like I'm going to have to decide which collisions actually require per-pixel accuracy and which will make do with bounding box collisions.

This is the part of development I enjoy the least, but I'm going to do my best to slog through and get the performance back up to an acceptable level. I'm going to have to look into the best way for detecting bottlenecks in the code, because surely there has to be a better way than just whacking a time measurement around the code you think is causing the problem...

I've also started thinking about my next game (getting ahead of myself a bit, I know), which I'm hoping I'll be able to enter into Microsoft's Dream, Build, Play contest. I've got a few ideas, it's difficult coming up with something original though (it's a shame the Sopwith game is a clone, otherwise I'd try to polish it up and enter it)

I've got a week off next week before I start my new job, so hopefully I'll be able to finish off Sopwith and start on the next game in that time.

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

So, the XNA contest is over (go vote), and my game barely got off the ground (so don't vote for me). As usual, my idea was far too ambitious and even the second time round I wasn't happy with the class structure I came up with. This is not the end of Kurodust Fighter though, this game WILL happen, but I think I need to start a bit smaller first.

As I was trying to come up with something smaller to do, I recalled an underrated little game that I played over a decade ago. It was awesomely fun for such a simple play mechanic, so I thought it would be a perfect game to do a remake/update of. Sopwith II.

So, when I have some time I will start planning this game out, and hopefully I'll actually get this one finished. I only thought of this last night (and only actually rediscovered what the game was called this morning, thanks to MobyGames), so this is in the pre-preliminary stages. Wish me luck!

So, I haven't managed to get any work done on Kurodust Fighter over the past two weeks, mostly because I haven't had time but also because I'm not quite sure where to go next.

I think I may end up starting over somewhat, as I need to plan the framework of my game a bit better. I'll obviously be using what I've learnt so far from the work I've done, and reusing a lot of the code, so I'm hoping it won't be much of a detour. I'm going to sit down and have a good think about what features I want in my game and how I'm going to implement them, and draw some nice pretty class diagrams or something so I've got a better idea of how I can get this happening.

No idea whether I'll get this done in time for the contest or not, but I'm really happy about the potential of this project so I'm going to do my best to stick with it.

So I finally got a bit more work done on Kurodust Fighter this morning and last night, I implemented what I'm calling 'Action Events' into the animation sequences that can trigger particular functions, so my little avatar can now kick the bins around the level. (I should probably be using some fancy C# delegates or something for these events, but I'm using strings and a switch statement. Meh.)

I also quickly implemented sprite flipping this morning, so now when my guy runs to the left, he faces left as well. Eg:

Next steps is getting some better looking backgrounds in there and then maybe some enemies. Hopefully I'll have some time tonight to do that.

So I've managed to get a bit more work done on the Kurodust Beat 'Em Up over the past couple of days, I've implemented a simple map system that includes items (which will eventually be able to be picked up and thrown/kicked around). I also implemented the sprite sorting tonight so that objects and characters are sorted and drawn based on their distance from the screen, so as you can see our little character (me, by the way) can walk around things and it's all drawn properly:

Forgive the dodgy background, I just quickly used some Photoshop filters to make some dodgy background to test things out.

Next steps: some sort of collision detection (at least when hitting the kick button, not sure about just walking around; shouldn't be too difficult though)

For story stuff: Should have a simple scripting language to move players to certain points on the screen and to show dialogue down the bottom of the screen with the character portrait. Will have to associate a portrait with each character.

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