xna3way

This is something I’m pretty excited about. The xna3way gang is proud to announce:

The Community Games (using XNA Game Studio) DVD Project!

This project is a showcase of work being done by people in the developer community using XNA Game Studio Express or Game Studio 2.0. It doesn’t matter if you are a professional developer, hobbyist or student. As long as your game is complete and playable, and you don’t mind sharing the source code then there’s room for you on the disk(s).

This is a living project, so there aren’t any hard deadlines. Once enough projects are submitted to fill the first DVD, an image will be made and then work will begin on the second disk, etc… The disks will be available for download as images and will also be distributed on physical media (details pending.)

The great thing about this project is that there is no cost to be included. The only requirements are as follows:

1. The game must be complete: playable and winnable. We aren’t looking for toolkits or libraries.
2. All source code must be included.
3. No stolen resources (this includes art, music, fonts, etc.) If you didn’t make it, you need permission to distribute it.
4. No offensive, obscene or pornographic content. Keep it clean. No drugs, racism or sex.

A lot of people will see these games. If you’re looking for a good way to get your game in the hands of a lot of people, for free, don’t miss this opportunity.

Stay tuned for more information!

For now, if you have questions about this project, contact me via this blog. I’ll post a URL soon with more info and a mechanism for submitting your games.

(For those of you wondering about Treehouse Troubles, yes it will be making an appearance on the first DVD.)

NOTE: This project is not affiliated with Microsoft or the XNA product team.

Well… Buttnumbing Code-a-thon II was a lot of fun and generally regarded as a success. We continue to work on our game, Treehouse Troubles and it should be finished in the next month or so.  Georgie had to bow out this time around due to a family emergency, but we pressed on in his absence. Fortunately the ZMan was able to step in and help out with some hilarious voice-overs and George did come through for us in a big way with some much needed art assets.  It was a lot of fun and I can’t wait to do it again next year.

Stay tuned to the next blog post for a very special announcement.

That’s the sad reality. We all got together in January, worked our asses off, fell a little short of our goal and then went our separate ways. The plan was to keep chugging along, but work, new babies, upcoming babies, Reality Check Games, moving and the need for sleep kept us from ever coming back to it.

I can’t promise that we’ll ever get back to Gejach, or Paradox. Too many exciting new ideas have come up and been forgotten since then, but still we’ve all kept in touch, and we’ve all been playing with new technologies and allowing greatness to percolate in the backs of our tiny little rat brains.

I’ve been playing more and more with TorqueX lately and I’m really impressed with how it’s shaping up, The TorqueX Builder (TXB) is a thing of beauty and makes parts of the process really painless. I’ve also been beta-testing some of their tutorials, which have helped my ramp up time, a lot! (I highly recommend the tutorials. Very well written.)

So anyway, I’ve just about convinced my buddy George to give TorqueX a try (he says.. “I’m just the artist” but we know that’s a load of crap.) Jason is hot on it again, so assuming no RC planes fly by (and blizzard doesn’t release another WoW expansion) we should be able to keep his interest long enough to crank something out, even if its just a rough prototype.

So Butt-numbing Code-athon 2 (aka my birthday) is coming up in a few months, and this time I think we’re gonna do it in Seattle. I dunno yet for sure. Maybe Portland. The plan is to work on (the beginnings of) a dungeon crawl. More on this and BnCa2 later.

Well, we went. We coded. We had a blast, celebrated a birthday,drank a ton of Woodchuck (well, I slowly sipped a couple of Woodchucks, but that’s just how I roll), played a mighty game of WoW: the Card game that will be recorded in the annals of history, but did we finish a game in a weekend? Umm..no.

No beating around the bush here. It was difficult, we gave it a run for the money and what we made we are dang proud of, but it’s not a game. Yet. We walked away from that weekend so excited by what we had started that we just have to finish it. We are like men possessed. Well, Jason and Chris are like men possessed, I came back from that weekend and slept. A lot.

Now though, I feel like I’m regaining my strength. I’m prepping my mind to re-enter the beauty that is our framework and work mighty wondrous things.

First though, I thought I would share a little teaser of the game intro. I mean who cares about gameplay, check out this snazzy title screen. MMMM…..good (although don’t get attached to that name, I think that’s still up in the air….)

For those of you who can’t see the embedded video, you can watch the video here).

[Yeah, I got the video working…enjoy! Hopefully there will be more videos and art assets to follow soon…]

Well, I said that I had my strength back, but I hear the call of some other projects right now that want to borrow a little of that strength. I do however to go through some of the artwork I made that weekend and post various samples to wet your whistle with. Once I get that finished, I need to huddle close with my co-conspirators and figure out what gameplay element we each will be focusing on next. I’m hoping they don’t say coffee runs again, I swear guys I can code! Geesh, mistakenly recode the .NET type framework one time and you’re fetching coffee and beef jerky all night long….

Well, we’ve done a METRIC CRAP TON of coding this weekend (and George doing art until this evening before joining the rest of the code monkeys). There will definitely be learning experiences we take away from this. For example, I definitely underestimated the amount of effort to write a framework for us from the ground up. However, it is mostly behind us now so we are starting to make good progress on game play. That’s another post for another time though.

I was _very_ skeptical that we would get this done this weekend until quite recently. However, things are really starting to come together. The game won’t be completely finished (it won’t include particle effects and the like and some of the other publish). We’re making good enough progress though that we have decided to pull an all-nighter tonight (the night before George and I fly back to the Northwest).

We haven’t made as many videos as I would have liked. Truth be told, I gave up like a fat, pimpled high school loser trying to get laid before flying off to college (without having to fork over cash before the “transaction” that is). First day we had some great conversations about game play and the trade-offs we were making but weren’t running the camera at the time. So, you may just have to settle for posts now (although I can at least prepare some of the first videos we did if you are all curious). I know I’m a geek (okay, borderline nerd), but I’m fairly excited about this all-nighter. I’ve never really done the all-night coding thing with friends, let alone stopping in the middle of it for a 3am Denny’s run. It should be a blast (no comments from the peanut-gallery about the fat guy being excited about the late night Denny’s trip, okay? M’kay?!?!?).

Well I’m burning precious coding time, so I must be getting back.

Gejach - [geh-zhok] (n) 1. Made-up, foreign sounding word. 2. Badass xna3way spaceshooter game.

Say the word aloud. Feel it reverberate in your skull like the force-feedback of an Xbox 360 controller in your hand.

So, what is Gejach? The short answer is that it’s a space shooter. Think of it at the transgenerational love child of Geometry Wars Evolved and Yars Revenge. Gameplay is deliciously simple, with a control schema reminscent of the two stick action of Geometry Wars combined with some of the basic “use your enemies defense as your offense” elements of Yars Revenge. It’s quite possibly the best of both worlds.

The premise 

We’re developing for multiplayer first, with single play AI if time permits. Objective Numero Uno was to have a working, playable, winnable game by Monday 1/8/07. We determined that we could get multiplayer done faster than single player combined with enemy AI.

The Controls

The control schema is kept simple so it works equally well on the 360 as on Windows simply by designing for a wired 360 controller.  Button mashing is eliminated in favor of smooth stick control for moving and firing (ala Geometry Wars, ala Robotron 2084.) Harvesting and the SuperWeapon (fueld by harvesting, ala Yars Revenge) is handled by the two triggers.

The Gameplay

You are the lone pilot and commander of your planetary defense system. Your mission is twofold. First, protect your planet from attackers by engaging and destroyer them in space combat. Your planet has a basic energy shield which is gradually weakened as it is attacked (or harvested) by your opponents. Simply playing defensive is not enough to win the game. Destruction of your opponents homeworld is the only way to ensure the peaceful existence of your species.

To this end, a superweapon was created. Unfortunately your world is not powerful enough to fuel the weapon and the planetary shield. It falls upon you to not only guard your home planet and engage attackers, but to also steal energy from your enemies defenses in order to power your superweapon.

Unfortunately, being energy based, your superweapon has its limitations. While it’s strong enough to destroy a planet with a single burst, if the ray is intercepted by the planetary shielding the energy is harmlessly dispersed across the grid. You must aim your shot to get through the holes in the shield created by your primary ship weapons.
Sounds easy enough, right? 

Keep in mind your enemy will be doing the exact same thing. In addition to your enemies, certain other obstacles may be in your way. One of these obstacles is asteroids. Big, bouncy asteroids. To help you, the ruling council of your planet has decided to teleport ship & weapon enhancements to you. Unfortunately their aim isn’t so good and these enhancements tend to end up floating space where anyone can grab them.

So how do I steal energy?

This is accomplished by skimming the energy shield of the opposing world while pressing the Left Trigger. Energy is transferred to the ship where it can be used for a superweapon blast or carried back to the player’s homeworld to augment the planetary defense system.

more to come…

Okay, the site is working again with Firefox. It turns out that it wasn’t a CSS issue. The issue was with some code formatting done by WordPress.

WordPress adds padding (using <p> tags) around content to get a nice content layout that isn’t too crowded. While it accounts for HTML elements like TABLE and the like, it doesn’t currently account for the OBJECT element (at least the version of the code base this site is running on). Because of this, when I used the OBJECT tag for my embedded video in the tutorial, it broke all the layout because it added a </p> tag after the object tag and before all the parameters.

So to fix it, I had to pop in to the PHP code and add OBJECT| to some of the RegEx expressions for the padding function. Yuck! I can’t believe I had to edit PHP code to fix it. Then again, the code was right there, so I could edit it just fine even though it was a bug in the product. So that’s pretty cool . A huge thanks go out to the Support Forums for WordPress where I found the solution right away since others have had the problem as well.

I also made some corrections to the various images we were adding in order to make the site XHTML compliant again. So, long story short, the site works again in Firefox and we are XHTML compliant as well.

Ciao!

Thanks to Ben and others, I’m now aware that the stylesheet is now broken for FireFox. It’s my own fault since I spent some time expanding the width of the site last night and adding the styles for the code. Apparently this broke it in FireFox.

Why didn’t I test it? Well, to be honest, I uninstalled FireFox as soon as I started using the latest IE .

So, time to re-install it and try to get this stylesheet working again. Apologies to all you FireFox users (since the code and tutorial obviously look like utter crap to you).