Salvation and Imagery

Well, a bit of an update on the game (whose name shall not be released until I have a couple of screen shots for you all to look at) as we move steadily toward our goals.

First, our two artists, Dan and Troy, are working hard at getting concept work for the game done. We are trying to establish a working art style and main character concept. When this process is done, one of the gents will be working on the main character’s art, and the other will begin working on the environmental art. And I have to say, the first concepts back are very promising. I think we will have a really good look for the game…that’s if the game runs…

And that’s where I come in. At the moment I have the basic engine done, that includes animations, interactions with objects in the world, scripted events, camera movement, and game state code. What I’m working on now is a full save and load of all game assets. This involves a process of NOT saving anything that the main game itself loads into memory when booting up. So, if an object has an image that goes with it, I’m not saving anything but the tag of the image and then running it through a load process that will use the Content.Load(“Tag”) code. Very soon (like this weekend) I should have a fully working save and load feature set. That means that I still have to implement a way of naming the save games and giving you an option as to which one you want to save, but that stuff is pretty lightweight coding.

As well, the main story of the game has gotten padded out a bit. I’m trying to make the game less “a bunch of stuff to do” and more “things you do for a reason.” I’m also pretty excited about some of the features we are adding to the game which will set it apart in some ways from other games that have come before in its genera.

So, that’s about it. I’m excited to see what new XNA things pop up on Xbox next week. And I’m hoping that the community can make some real progress forward in the coming months. It’s not so bad working in a dank dingy condemned basement when you know that somewhere out there, there are other people doing the same thing.