XNA Game Studio Express 1.0 and TorqueX came out. I gave it a spin and looked at a few of the starter kits. Torque is a rather complex beast so I didn’t get too far with it for the time i spent with it, but it looks promising.
On the topic of WildBoarders, I’m releasing version 1.0.1 today. This version runs in XNA 1.0 and is simply using the updated Farseer Physics Engine. This fixes a lot of the major gameplay issues with bouncing and smoothness over the terrain. In addition to the binary release, I am releasing the source code as-is for WildBoarders 1.0.1. Hopefully it’ll help those looking to make similar 2D scroller games and can use this as an example. Keep in mind, there’s some areas you probably don’t want to use as an example as this was made for a competition and somethings were last minute throw-together code. You can also find it in the Code Archives section of my site.
Regarding future work, I’ll be picking up WildBoarders and polishing it probably sometime in January. I’d like to finish a few other things prior to that. One of those is the camera tutorial for XNA, which I’ll be redoing. After finishing WildBoarders I found there’s a few design problems with the camera system tutorial and I’d like to address those. While the first tutorial was a very light-weight camera system (which wasn’t the version used in WildBoarders, but similar) I’m going to go ahead and make a fully functional 2D rendering system with layers, camera control, and animation. I’ll be releasing parts of the series as I finish each section. So stay tuned for those popping up on my site. I finished writing the framework last night so it shouldn’t be long before the first part is up, hopefully.