Saturday, March 12, 2011

Angry Cosmos

For Week 3, I had a few ideas on what game to make, but I really wanted to learn how to do true vector based graphics.

So, after a false start and 3 days of being sick and watching the entire season of Cosmos in between naps, I bring you "Angry Cosmos", a XNA 4.0 implementation of Asteroids.

I never truely understood the whole 3D Matrices until now and once I did was able to whip this out pretty fast. I believe the skill I gained from the last two projects helped as well.

Source available on GitHub: https://github.com/jgoewert/angry_cosmos

Thursday, March 3, 2011

One Week Game Making Challenge

A few weeks ago, Frank gave me the idea of making/remaking a game a week using XNA 4.0. Starting last Sunday, I have been doing just that. I am redrawing all my own sprites and generating all the sounds.

Now, most people will say "I can crank that out in a day, and it takes you a week." While that may be true, working a full time job and having a family of four with young kids makes my time commitment about 1 hour a day and 2 a day on weekends. So, in the end, I do spend about 8 hours total.

Week 1: Derp's Revenge - an homage to the Atari 2600 game, Yar's Revenge.

Source Code and Binaries are available on Github.
Day 1: Got Derp (the
player) moving around and shooting. Added Qotile and shield blocks.
Day 2: Added nibbling of shield blocks and keyboard input
Day 3: Added shield movement (up and down and rotating)
Day 4: Didn't work on.
Day 5: Added enemy missile, large cannon, sound effects and background music.
Day 6: Handled player death and resetting game
Day 7: Added the neutral zone and the Qotile turning into the swirl. Game = Done

Since then, I have started bug fixing, code cleanup, and just general upkeep stuff.

Week 2: Herp Invaders: an homage to the arcade game, Space Invaders.

Source Code and Binaries are available on Github.

Day 1: Created the basic framework (GameObject from Derp's Revenge)
Day 2: Added invaders, player, and controls.
Day 3: Added shields.
Day 4: Invaders shoot back.
Day 5: Merged GameObject with my Derp's Revenge GameObject (Started using velocity for movement)
Day 6: Enemies destroy shields and added next level reset
Day 7: Added UFO, player destroying own shields, sounds and scoring