The more things change…

Well, a lot is going on here in our musty basement, and I suppose it’s time to fill you all in on everything.

First, we are going through a bit of a staff cycling. At least one of the artists who have worked with us since October will be winding down his development work over the next couple of weeks and finishing off some really great concept pieces showing the world of the game in general.

Because of this, we are looking to bring on a few new artists to do the actual game assets. We are currently interviewing a number of very talented people who have shown real interest in the project. We are very optimistic that we will be filling desks with people who can pick up from where our excellent concept artists have left off.

In other news, we are in the process of incorporating. We filed for S-Corp status as of Tuesday of this week, and we will be hopefully moving forward as a full fledged company by the middle of April. With that will come a real company website and a real honest to goodness name.

We are pushing forward with programming and music at this time and though a lot of my time is eaten up by speaking with artists, I am still working on getting our game engine in shape and looking into the new promises that XNA 3.1 is offering.

From a purely game engine point of view, there are a few things that still need to be developed. An engine for scripted events is in its infant stage and still needs to be further fleshed out. We currently have no audio system, and we are holding off until XACT3 comes out to really start to tackle that aspect of the game. And finally, cut scenes (as opposed to scripted events) are yet to be worked out. For everything that needs to get done in the game, these are small things (though audio is admittedly a fairly large undertaking).

We are also going through a series of small story changes and tweaks to flesh out some of the background of the game and the things you’ll be encountering. We’re hoping that this gives a slightly more engaging narrative experience for the player.

And that’s it, for now. Other than the large refrigerator with it’s obligatory flickering light we’ve just had installed in anticipation of becoming a corporation, we are still working in the same broken down sub basement that we’ve been in since August of last year. But there seems to be a slight breeze of change blowing through. Though that may just be the herd of rats changing direction again out in the far corner of our dank and dreary offices.

Slow, Slow Progress

So here we are, the middle of March, when I had hoped to be getting our website up and the first few screen shots out to the public to reveal the game we’ve been working on since August. However, due to unforeseen hurdles, we’re not quite there yet. We are hoping now to have something by the end of April. Fingers Crossed.

From the programming side, I’ve been making a few changes to the way the engine runs and how object interact with each other. Things are getting much closer to done on the programming side, though there will be massive amounts of testing to do once I have real assets in the game building tools I’m designing.

This brings me to a point of discussion that the team has been having. Since the Xbox 360 limit for file size is 150MB compressed, we are going to have to make some sacrifices for the console version of the game. However, we are planning on a PC version that we will release afterward with more music, more sound effects, higher resolution art, and possibly an extra thing or two in the game. The PC version will probably be slightly more expensive than the Xbox version (we’re talking like a dollar here), to make up for the extra effort in that one.

We are also getting close to getting our website up and our game revealed. A bit more work on the team’s part and we will be giving you a small glimpse of what we hope will be an exciting new XNA game for both the Xbox 360 and the PC.

Until then, I’ll keep you posted on our progress as it comes up.

Chugging Along

We haven’t had an update in a while since there really hasn’t been much to report. Things slowed down for about a month due to the fact that this XNA game isn’t our full time paying job (in fact, it hasn’t paid any of us yet, so it’s not even a part-time paying job yet). But we are back on track and attempting to make up for lost time. We are still hoping for a December release for the game, and perhaps some other cool milestones along the way. We are also now expecting to reveal the game some time in April with a new website and screenshots to go with it.

However, the current phase of production is exceptionally boring in the blog area. I am currently working on the game data for level layout and object placement/activity, all of the animations and game states. This is a long and tedious process that is so incredibly integral to the game that there won’t be one without it. However, when it is done, the artists (both visual and audio) will know everything there is to know about every level and object in the game. It’s pretty cool to see the ideas that started out as vague concepts in my head evolve into art, programming, and data.

Another side of our production has born some fruit. Dave, our composer has put together a few great concept pieces for the game’s music. They really are incredibly impressive for the short amount of time it took him to put them together.

So, things are moving along here. We are trying to reach out and touch base with a few different people in the games journalism side of things to maybe give them a first look to get our name out there a bit when we finally do move to reveal the game. So far, we’ve been met with total silence. I’m hoping we have a little more success in the coming weeks.

Ah, that’s the service elevator; the exterminator is here for this noon-time trip to try to hold back the growing infestation of what look like mutated rats that have been trying to eat our office furniture. I’m off to do what I can to defend our small fragile development studio.

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.