This post is going to be hugeeee so be sure to grab a packet of crisps whilst reading .

Firstly I would like to apologies to everyone for me not posting in a while. I had exams.  On the other hand, I added some new stuff to my blog and I was working hard on an engine for Crimson Knights first official game.

Before I begin talking about our new game, I would like to introduce our team:

Michael Smith: Room Provider, Guider and Adviser of Crimson Knights

Gary Forbes: Room Provider, Guider and Adviser of Crimson Knights

Jaspal Atwal: Programmer, Web Designer

ME: Programmer

Rayner O’Brian: Programmer (Still in training)

Lewis “Spuddy” Easton: Concept development and paper artist

Jacob Kew:Idea Development, Concept Development, Computer Artist and Gameplay designer

Alexander Hall: Music

Kyle Medford-Hawkins: Music

Now to move on to our game.

The game is currently called Project X until someone can think of a name for it. At the moment there are still many ideas being thrown around everywhere depending on how the game play would work. First I will announce the things which are defiantly happening:

The game would involve you playing as a jelly cube which carries weapons. It has to survive as long as it can from eye-shaped enemies which attack it. The enemies change as the levels progress and more of them appear. We would also include an option for the player to set their own difficulty level. The game would have other modes like Infection and Capture/Defend the flag, however those two modes would be an online exclusive (Yes we are adding online play ).

Now for the ideas which we are constantly changing :S

1) The jelly blob will either have exclusive attacks depending on what character you choose, or they would have six different faces, with their own different weapon. Those weapons would lose in strength the longer you use a face.

2) You may have to suck jelly to stay alive (crazy idea)

The game idea/’s have come from inspiration given from our team and Rob Miles.

The engine for this all is being developed by me and Jazz based on things we have learned from Rob Mile’s awesome book .

Now for the best news to sum all of this up.  We received an XBOX 360 from Microsoft. Not just any 360, an XBOX 360 ELITE. We were practically drooling at the sight of it. We plugged it in and played some Halo 3 in order to get me inspiration and to generally have fun with the team. We haven’t installed XNA on it yet because we still need to connect to the internet and get XBOX LIVE.

P.S. were receiving a cable from Microsoft in order to help us get the best experience with the 360 on Monday.

I unfortunately am going on holiday next Friday, so I wont be able to keep you up to date until after the summer holidays

OUR LOGO

My news graphics card is finally working. This means I can finally use Game Studio 2.0 to its best. I am sorry If I didn’t post in a while, I have exams coming up. We also have a new game coming up but I can just give away what we have in store for you. We have decided that we are now called Crimson Knights.

As our trip to Microsoft is tomorrow, I have a few announcements about my blog and our final product.

I’ll start with my blog first. I am going to completely redesign the blog and make it seem neater than it is at the moment because it is messey . I will also make it seem more like a webpage and talk about more of the types of projects I do.

Now that I got that announcement out of the way, time to get down to the important stuff.

Our attempt at making our first game in XNA has been a difficult “journey”. We only started the project last monday and today is when we handed it in to microsoft. We had many different errors and annoying set-backs, some of which where so bad that we had no choice but to cut them out. A good example of this is the Main Menu and Wall Hitest.

There are simply no good tutorials out on the web which teaches us how to make a simple sprite stop moving when it touches another sprite. As a result the games concept has been changed completely into a different style of game, a “catch me if you can game.” This involves a person chasing down the other player and bombing them. The person who lasts the longest with dieing is the winner.

The game menu was even more fustrating as none of our code actually worked with it for some reason. It was a shame that we had to cut it out; howevever we created a basic one as a last resort.

Screenshots

the annoying news: I have a two hour exam tomorrow and I’m lucky that I’m even able to make it to Microsoft tomorrow. Here is my schedule:

9 – 11AM Do Functional Skills exam

11AM – 3PMish Go to Microsoft

As the deadline approaches, Jazz and I are really starting to rush for time. We have been working on the game for a week. Here is an update of what we managed to get working:

• A Main Menu (Still need to confirm this, the code has no error but my PC cant debug)
• Two Bomberman Sprites which can be controlled with a 360 controller or the Keyboar

It may not seem like much, however we only started learning XNA a few weeks ago. This collab has been fun working on and will only be shown to Microsoft. After the event ends, we will join the other members of Prospects “Game Making Company” in order to discuss about our first official game.

Me and my friend Jazz have been give a task on monday to create a game to take with us to microsoft. Its going to be a bomberman style game. Im sorry that I can’t post any screenshots of our progress, My graphics card does not support XNA. The only thing which I can do in XNA is write code and see if it has any errors; I can not debug. Anyway, we’re hoping to finish the game by next monday. We dont have much time to create advanced features; however if we have any spare time, we will add as much as possible. We got the game working with the XBOX controller yesterday which was really good

After studying XNA a bit more after school, I finally understand about 20% of the coding concepts; however there are a few more things which I would like to know before I start to make a game. I mainly want to know about custom classes,  pipelines,  adding basic 3D modeling and how to make a GUI.

As soon as I read the first two chapters of Rob Miles’s book, everything started to slowly make sense. The chapters are written in a reassuring tone and is explained in an easy to understand way. I only read the first, free, two chapters of the book and XNA already feels easier to use. I can transfer some of knowledge from flash vaguely into XNA. I’m defiantly asking my dad to buy this for me.

On June 11th, my awesome ICT teacher invited me to come with him to Microsoft. We are supposed to show them what we have been doing in XNA. I personally don’t want to disappoint them; I want to impress them. As soon as I get my new computer, I am going to be studing XNA like there’s no tomorrow to show microsoft. Mr Smith gave me some good advice“This is a once in a life oppurtunity; at the end of the day it’s who you know. I know that you will make it big in the business, but you have to start somewhere on the ladder. You can make friends with people at Microsoft and other companies such as RARE.” good advice! Finally I can get my career started

Now that we have begun to develop games, Mr. Smith suggested that we think of a company name. I don’t want anything boring like “Prospect Games”, so I thought of some mythical creatures and based names around them.

• Nova Ninja
• ChimeraTech Games
• Firezard Games
• Crystal Knight Games
• Silver Taurus

As we start to dig deeper into the code, A few Ideas have come to me. Most of tese are mainly due to how XNA is presented. We found a program called Torque X which can make game development easier. I also would like for the interface to be improved to somthing like Flash in Game Studio 3