A New Year, A New Game

Well, it’s 2009 and we have scrapped the old game and started working on a new one. Yep, fired the entire team, deleted all the old files, and we are now working on an MMO! I think this will work out well for us since MMO’s are really the fastest and easiest way to make money these days.

No?

Ah well, then I suppose I’ll hire everyone back and keep working on our project. Well, at least now they don’t have to pack up all of their moldy equipment down here and worry about spreading some of the more…um…particular strains of the fungus that live in some of the corners of this basement.

All kidding aside, work continues on our XNA Game, codenamed ATSS at the moment. We are hoping to have some screen shots up during March, but I’m not making any promises. A lot rides on the progress of the game’s art, and that’s something we really want to get right. So we’re not rushing it.

I spent most of December working on story elements for the game, a huge background document, and environment and story/challenge descriptions for the game. With that behind me for the moment, I’m now back at making world creation tools so that I’m not coding all of the XML by hand.

The first new tool is an object creation tool. It’s a regular C# Windows Application that allows me to put in all of the information about an object in the game through a form. It also allows me to create animations from a sprite sheet automatically, and then tweak them as I need to. I’ve also implemented a “Play” feature that allows me to play the animation after it’s been generated. A speed feature has been placed there as well to speed up and slow down the animation rate. I am now implementing a piece of the object information that dictates states and one that involves how the object interacts with the world.

For anyone making an XNA game, I would say that building creation tools is one of the most imperative pieces of the process. They do a few things for you. First, they allow you to build areas of your game much more quickly and easily than modifying a data file by hand. They also allow you make quick changes and test them very quickly. The second part of it is, that you get to know your code much better. Yes, I know you probably wrote the code, but as in the case of my own object structure, I wrote that code in October, and here I am over two months later. It also reveals holes in your object structures, things you may not have thought of when you first designed the game.

Well, that’s about it. I hope the rest of the XNA community has had a great new year, and I’m looking forward to see what we do in 2009.