This month we have mostly been getting aquianted with the new team.

All of the members are in 6th form. Here are their roles within the team. (Some still need confirmation)

Chirag Harendra – Team Leader, artist and handiman

Jay-Christopher Durrante – Programmer

Stephen Reynolds – main graphics artist and concept development

William Nkhono – Programmer

In this page, I will keep you up-to-date with what is going on within our Imagine Cup team and their progress.

Our XNA team is different to our Imagine Cup team; however since the Imagine Cup is still “budding”, I have given them access to any engines which I have coded in order to make it easier for them to make the game.

After we were aqquainted, both teams sat down and helped them think of an Idea for the game based on the United Nation targets (or something like that.) Jay suggested water. It looked easy at the time however it was a lot harder than it seemed

Thinking of a game to do with water but still keeping the concept entertaining was an annoying tedious job that took 3 gatherings to sort out. The name came out fast and clean, even before we decided whats going to be in the game.

Breathtaking. I shall call it Heli-Aid

Sorry for the doctor evil reference but I felt like I had to say it. Anyway, here is a list of the ideas we had

Heli-Aid idea 1 – Your living in a world where technology is endless. You can create anything with anything. You make some hybrid helicopter which has different tools in order to deliver water.

Reason for Trashing: It sounded like the story was tripping over itself. We thought that if technology was “endless”, the people without food should have access to it anyway.

Merciless Janitor – This game idea was scrapped nearly instantly it was thought up, but it was funny nonetheless. This was a game to tackle illness rather than water as a theme. This next sentance is what made everyone reject the idea. You play as Janitor wo cleans toilets from nasty bacteria.

Reason for Trashing: see above

Random Virus Game – also tackling the theme of illness, Random Virus Game was by far the easiest to implement game of the lot. You begin by choosing a strain of virus. Every strain comes with its own stats. You can then make them more vicious and deadly. The objective to kill the world mwhahahahahahahahaha *cough* *cough* anyway…

Reason for Trashing: umm… I don’t remember exactly, but I think it was because it sounded like a boring game

Heli-Aid idea 2 – This is the latest idea for Heli-Aid. You play as a 3d helicopter in a 3d environment doing missions like turning off the tap. You also have a battery bar which drains. If it runs out whilst in the middle of a mission: GAME OVER. Co-op play would be mroe fun with this idea. This idea uses 3D so I am a little bit uneasy about it. I have no knowledge nor any experience with 3d game design or programming.

Reason for scrapping: We beleived that it would be to difficult to implement in such as small amount of time

Project “A” – This is the newest latest idea for our imagine cup project. I cannot give away details about the game yet as its being kept underwraps; but on the plus side i can confirm it sounds pretty addictive!!!!

The last meating before half term ¬¬ was disappointing. Only one person turned up and that was William. I gave him a little prize (Lending him my Rob miles XNA Book (which is awesome)) He left half way through becuase no one bothered to come. They were supposed to have a photo shoot as well. For the last half hour, we worked on Assimosis

Heli-Aid – Made by our Imagine Cup team by using the theme of water. You play as a 3d remote control helicopter that flys

Assimosis – Made by Crimson Knights. This game needs to be designed as we are still mostly unsure of what you can do. I have mostly changed my attention to Heli-Aid and helping the Imagine Cup team out; however this project is still on the list of completion.

Firstly – This is no longer Henrik’s scripting weblog. It is now Henrik’s XNA weblog of prospect. THis now means that I will be reporting about all things XNA going on around the school as well as my own personal experiences.

Secondly – We have our own team which is entering for the Imagine Cup 09. Check out the page dedicated to them

Thirdly – Our XNA game has a name and it’s own Page. You should check that out as well

I’ll be posting definately every wednesday from now on. I will also be posting other posts on other days depending on whether I receive new news that day.

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

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

• 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.