So far the new year is working out A-OK. I’m about 60 hours into developing my new game framework and 5th prototype for my next project. For those that are curious, it is being written in Blitzmax. Why? well it’s a straightforward language that is also pretty easily extensible, should the need arise. I’ve used Blitzmax’s predecessor for about 2 years, and I’m familiar with it. What more reason do I need?...

A lot has been happening lately, but not much worth writing about (aka I’m too damn tired at the moment to be bothered writing it). It’s been a good year, and I’m gearing up for a busy 2008 with plenty of ideas and goals I hope to set in motion and accomplish :). Hint: One of those goals is to update this blog more frequently. Catch you on the flip side!...

Yawn! Man, I’m tired but can’t fall asleep. Just finished my first play session on Gunstyle on the Xbox 360 a few hours ago with a friend (2 player split-screen). The day before I finally got split screen working fully (up to 4 players) with the exception of the in-game HUD. Overall, we had a good laugh and the rounds were exciting, but I’m not satisfied with the controls :|. Since a big part of Gunstyle is movement, this creates a poor gameplay experience....

After a lot of tinkering I got split screens functioning in Gunstyle. TorqueX supports split screens natively so i expected it to work rather simply, but due to some modifications and how Gunstyle game code worked on top of TX it complicated things a bit. Below is just a screenshot of two player screen shot on “Fool’s Paradise”. This is also working on Xbox 360. I am going to have to optimize some load times as they are drastically longer on the 360 (particularly loading assets initially on start up)....

It has been a while since I’ve talked about Gunstyle so I figured a post was due on the status of the game… Right now development is rather slow just due to our busy college schedules. It’s also the last 90% so it’s always tough ;). Right now Gunstyle is a PC only title due to it being a multiplayer centric game (XNA 1.0 lacking networking functionality on the 360). Personally, I’d love to see Gunstyle on the Xbox 360 and take it in that direction, but I guess it’s more of a ‘wait and see’ right now until XNA 2....

Hey again! Two updates in less than a month! Wonder if I can keep this up :). Anyway, just finished another article for Ziggy’s site. This one shows you how to do those cool, seamless ribbon trails you sometimes see trailing behind melee weapons (swords, sticks, etc) and other objects. I’ve also included a sample with full source code that works on both the PC and Xbox 360. So go check it out!...

Wow it has been a while! School is back into full swing so I’m spending time at school and in labs longer than should be legally allowed :|. I managed to scrounge up some spare time to write up this distortion shader article and some explanation of how things work for Ziggyware.com. Go check it out! Feedback is welcome as I’m still somewhat new to the world of shaders. Below is an example picture of the post-process shader in action....

I’ve written networked games in the past, but never in XNA. So after writing the networking logic for Gunstyle I figured I could write a blurb about general networking in games for XNA, which in reality isn’t that much different from any other API. I do not claim to be some expert in networking and I only present to you what I know based off prior experience from a few multiplayer networked games. Oh, and yes I am aware the diagrams are not completely correct UML diagrams, I am simply trying to illustrate a point. This isn’t a How-To guide to networking either, just food-for-thought for those just starting out with networked games. ...

Its been quiet on my blog and the End Dream site, due to me being on vacation. And man, was the beach great! Now I have to get back into the daily work routine :(. Oh well, that’s life as it seems. So we’ve got an update for Gunstyle available to any irc #xna chatters on EFNet at the moment. A lot of the major core building and development is done with Gunstyle and we are now shifting into more of a ‘polish’ mode to fix bugs and tring to create an accessible, easy, and hassle-free multiplayer experience....

Last night we hosted our very first semi-public play test with the new XNA version of Gunstyle. Tonight is the midnight deadline for submitting to Dream Build Play. I’ve been hearing some bad experiences about it, so we’re all a little worried about getting it submitted in time. We’re going to be submitting our current build for now, but also try to get more fixes in before the deadline and hopefully submit a newer one later today....