More Chairs

Well, things march along here, and that crunching underfoot is the long road to success (well, that and the creepy crawlies that scuttle across the damp and dreary cement floor down here). We are making further strides in the development of ATSS and adding new desks and chairs to our digs which, while dilapidated and dangerously filled with mold spores, are quite spacious.

We have had two new members added to the game team and both are exciting new faces, so full of light and hope that one is almost sad to see them come into the dank environs of our “studio,” since a day or two down here will quickly dim their sunny outlooks. Enough with waxing poorly poetic. Time for some John McCain style straight talk.

We have brought on to the team a music lead and a website designer. Yes, we are planning on having music in the game, and yes we are going to be launching an official website in March. Our hope is to get you fine people aware of the game and excited about playing it.

So we welcome Dave and Stephano to the team, which makes us now five people strong. We’re like an actual little game dev team.

In the art area, things are beginning to bloom. Concept layouts of the game are coming in daily now and we are prepping for actual game ready art to come in the next two months. Even the concept stuff looks amazing, and I’m very excited to see what the final product will look like.

As well, I’m tap-tap-tapping away at my keyboard finishing up the Object Creation tool for the game. Yes, our game has objects. Yes, there are enough of them to warrant a creation tool. Soon I will begin work on the level designer which will allow me to place these objects in the levels and give them more properties. It’s all very exciting.

So that’s where we are now. Between pick up games of 2 on 3 basketball (I’m always the 3rd, since I work as a handicap for any team that has me) and some rousing round-abouts of “row row row your boat” we are getting work done.

Look for more updates to come in the next few weeks as we begin to really get some of the level design pushed forward.

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.

Season's Greetings

Well, this basement looks pretty darn nice with the Christmas lights I’ve put up. I of course don’t really turn them on; it attracts all manner of creepy-crawlies when I do. But just having them hanging here, full of luminescent potential, cheers the place up a bit.

Now, to ATSS…the time is coming when it will no longer be known as ATSS, my good friends. The game that started off as a space Role Play adventure morphed significantly a few months ago and is now something else entirely. And its coming along splendidly. Right now Dan and Troy are working on storyboarding the whole shebang, and we are working on quite a bit of story work at the moment, fleshing out everything that happens in the game, and where it happens. I’m also working very heavily on what happened in the world before the game.

So since there isn’t much I can say about the game proper at the moment without letting the cat out of the bag, I figured I’ll give some idea of what our timeline looks like for the game.

We are planning on a February or March reveal including some screen shots, description of the game, and a website. During the summer we are planning some game updates as well as some web content to help people get excited for the game and get into the world of…oops, I almost said it.

Release is planned for before Christmas next year on the Xbox 360. We are hoping to talk to Microsoft about their plans as well for being able to sell XNA games over Games for Windows, but we have to see how that will work.

So that’s about it. I’m going to get back to writing about this world and its inhabitants, and you folks can get back to wondering whether we’re making a first person farming simulator.

An early Merry Christmas and Happy Chanukah to all!

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.

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.

A web of References

So, things are progressing along on the programming side of the new ATSS game. However, things are still slow going on the art side. Our team is working and moving along, but these are still the introductory weeks and everything is all about concepts and style at the moment. When the art team really kicks into gear I’m sure things will be moving along smoothly.

As for myself, I’m building a web of references. In a game like the one I’m building, every object in the game needs to be able to interact with several game systems that have to have a persistent state. If we were programming in VB, I might do this with global variables. But, since we are doing this in C# (which XNA is set up in), I have to do it by reference passing.

For those who aren’t programmers, the whole idea can be boiled down pretty simply. Say you have a word document that you want to distribute to your friends. You have a couple of options. You can put the document on a central computer and let everyone access it by placing a link on their desktop to that document (kind of like any page on the internet, it’s stored on someone else’s computer, and you just have a link to it), or you can send them a copy through e-mail.

Now in the second situation, if you send them a copy, they can make any changes they want to it and your original document doesn’t change. They have a completely independent copy. But what if you want them to see all of your changes? Or, what if you want to also see the changes they make to it? Well then the first situation is what you really want. In that set up, you only have one document stored on a computer, and everyone opens, reads, and edits the same document.

This is the difference between what we call “passing by value” and “passing by reference.” Passing by value means that you send a copy of one object to another object. This is fine for really small objects, and things that you don’t care about changing. But if you have a very large object, and you care about how it changes, and you want to keep track of its changes, you need to pass by reference.

And this is what I’m doing right now, creating a web of references throughout the main game engine. I’m not sure if this is how “real” game programmers do things, but it’s how I know to do it. When I get to a point where I’m serializing the data out (or “saving” it) from one test to the next, then I will have to set up a system for renewing these references every time the game loads. This is one of those things that will happen when the loading message comes up. My hope is to mask that message with images and story elements.

So, development is continuing, and piece by piece programming breakthroughs are popping up over the weeks. So for those who are getting excited for a game they know nothing about…stay there.

Crowded again!!!

Well well well…the basement is starting to get crowded again.

Development has begun again after a brief pause, reevaluation, and redesign of the game. What this means is that I’ve basically thrown most of the development from the past two months out the window (most, not all) and re-scoped the project.

For now, let’s keep calling it ATSS…but that’s not what it is. Among the Silent Stars is dead, most likely never to be reborn. However, one never knows.

In its place a new game emerges, leveraging quite a bit of existing code and intellectual background. This new game is also a much smaller game; much less ambitious from a technical and artistic point of view. This means that there will be less on the development side and much less on the art side.

Speaking of art, two new desks have popped up here in the dank sub-basement of our illustrious studios. They are equipped with lightboxes and everything, which is nice since the smoke from the torches I had keeping this place lit was probably causing me the early stages of black-lung, not to mention a very creepy Silent Hill kind of vibe.

So yes, that’s right, I have brought two new artists onto the team. This means that we are in fact a real team now. Updates will come soon enough on their roles and such in the game.

So, that’s about all for now. The new game is in its very beginning stages, and as it is a different kind of game than ATSS, I’m doing a bunch of redesign code-wise, which is exciting.

Stay tuned as we head down this new path.