Hardhats and Pencils

So it’s been a bit since I last updated, and a lot has been going on. Let’s start on the artist front.
We are in round three of artists for this project. I would say that I’m beginning to think that artists are, as a rule, an uncommunicative and taciturn group. However, my new artists seem to be breaking that rule a bit. Dan, a real professional at this, has been much more responsive than any of his predecessors. We have also brought on Troy to work with Dan as our artistic team and I’m in the process of bringing him up to speed on the project.

So with our art team pretty safely squared away (I hope), I can move on to programming. And that, my friends, is going very well. I have about 60% of the game engine done, and I’m hoping to be at about 90% by the middle of December. What this means is that once I get the game engine in place, the rest of the game development is going to be spent actually building the game, scripted events, and tweaking game play and performance.

My latest programming success was building the main framework of the scripted events engine. Now, this is a 2D game, so it’s not nearly as complex (I’m guessing) as a 3D scripting engine. As well, audio is not yet come into play (that will be the last 10% of the engine to be tackled). However, as of last night, I had a working scripted event where a character moves around the screen, and does a few other things.

The next step is a scripted event builder tool. This means that I put together a whole new program that allows me to display assets from the game, move them around the screen, and assign them dialog, actions, and animations as they go. This itself will be a big undertaking, but it will speed up scripted event development later on immensely.

So, down here in the basement, it’s all architecting and drawing, hardhats and pencils. I hope the rest of the XNA world is making as much progress, and I’m excited to see what’s going up on XBL from our community.