Well, Nut Harvest is out to the public and so far it seems most that have tried it have enjoyed it. That’s always good to hear, considering it was just a toy-around game for my friends and I :). Unfortunately, I know that it certainly won’t get as big of an audience as WildBoarders simply because it’s an XBox360 XNA exclusive. There just doesn’t seem to be a good venue yet to release Xbox360 XNA games. Sure, there are community sites on the net such is homebrew or gameprojects.com but they still seem to be focused on PC development or the ‘wanderers’ there simply don’t have creator’s club and it’s still not convienent to put games on the 360. Add in the fact that getting games on your 360 isn’t free, and your audience shrinks yet again. But I’m not that disappointed. Going into the project I knew what to expect. But now that it’s done I’m not sure I’ll be inclined to do another 360 only game for a while; at least until Microsoft comes up with an easier way to share games. Sure, I could do games that work on both systems (such as WildBoarders), but there still are some fundamental differences to the platforms in question that kind of limit my choices. For example, if I make a single player game then I really don’t have any reason not to make it runnable on the 360. Yet, once I get into the realm of multiplayer things start to diverge rather quickly. On the PC, multiplayer these days usually implies some sort of internet connectivity. This isn’t possible on the 360 (yet). It’s rare (at least in my experience) to have multiplayer games be played on the same computer. On the 360, multiplayer can mean split-screen, xbox live, or a combination of both! I designed Nut Harvest to be a multiplayer game where everyone is on the same screen. So I was presented with two choices. Make it playable over the internet or simply make it 360 only. Going the internet route would have increased development time, and at the same time the game simply would lose a certain social element of the experience (*click* “OMG I pwn3d joo” *click* on ventrilo doesn’t count). Playing next to your buddies just makes this particular game more fun since communication is part of the experience (players teaming up against others). So yea, that was my reasoning as to why I stuck with just doing a 360 version.
In other news, I’m rolling along with development for our entry for the Dream.Build.Play contest that is coming up. Downside: it won’t be done in as short amount of time as my prior games. Upside: more time = better game, right?….RIGHT? Well, let’s hope so ;). July 2nd is apparently the due date, and according to the design doc we have laid out we’ll need it all :|. I just finished coding the networking architecture for the game last week, and Martin has the custom physics up and running also. It’s possible to join servers and move around and such, but there’s still a ton of work to be done. Adam’s handling the art-side of things once again so I can focus along with Martin on the coding/gameplay. With that said, my blog entries might slow down over the coming months as school gets busier and the game gets closer to being finished. Don’t want to say anything too specific or talk about what’s planned for the game until we have something to actually show, so that’ll be atleast a month or so away. Anyway, now I got to go study for an exam and work on a CS project.