Development of "Deep Blue"

Hello 2011…and February

2011-02-01T22:54:00.001-06:00

After a little break from “Deep Blue” and XNA in general (due mostly in part to the fact that the “Upgrade” from XNA 3.1 to 4.0 was more painful than a root canal), things are rolling again.

I’ve been doing a good bit of tinkering with Unity3D, which seems to be much easier to pickup than XNA dev but at this point it wouldn’t make any sense to start over again. So…possibly in a sequel game :)

In response to my previous post (back in November) about the “Future of XNA”. It seems to be pretty secure for the time being (although it’s leaning heavily toward the Windows Phone 7 market…which has yet to do much of anything).

They moved the indie games tab BACK to the games section of the XBox 360 dashboard. Hopefully whoever suggested that it be moved next to the “avatar clothes” section was hopefully fired.

And believe it or not, Deep Blue is finally running in XNA 4.0. There are still a few minor details to work out, but I think I’ll spend more time optimizing code than picking up the last few pieces of the conversion.

I’ve also been taking a 14 week XNA workshop online for the past 3 weeks. Currently we’re covering a lot of 3d development, which is only marginally related to Deep Blue (being a 2d game), but it does have Connor recommending that the next Deep Blue game be in 3d.

Things are still expected to move a little slow as I get my XNA legs back under me. But the ball is rolling again.

Future of XNA…

2010-11-06T15:27:00.001-05:00

A month or so ago the official XNA site, the Creators Club, got a new redesign. It re-launched 80% focused on Windows 7 Mobile development and about 20% XNA indie games.

Then, last week, the new Xbox dashboard launched. It appears indie games are no longer considered ‘games’. Microsoft has opted to file the XNA indie games under the ‘Specialty Shop’ category, along with Avatar clothes and Music downloads. As a result, (according to the community’s official sales numbers), purchases are down 50% and trial downloads are down 75%.

Soon, but still at an undefined time, Game Studio 4.0 will be released. The upgrades and changes to the Game Studio are also centered around Windows 7 mobile.

Torque, the only 3d engine that currently supports XNA has announced the next version of their TorqueX engine will be centered around Windows mobile development and that they “haven’t decided yet what their plans are for Game Studio 4.0 support”.

All these things have the XNA community up in arms, which has further effects.

Several of the better, more well-known developers/companies have officially stated they’re moving on from XNA to Steam or iPhone development. The shift in the sale figures simply isn’t worth the cost of development. This coming from the makers of “Beat Hazard” and other top 20 selling XNA games. *A funny side note…they’ve specifically said they WON’T be doing Windows7 mobile development.

Arkedo, makers of some of the most polished professional games in XNA “JUMP!”, “SWAP”, and “PIXEL” haven’t released a game for XNA in nearly a year. I think it’s pretty safe to say they’re done.

So, take out a lot of the best developers and best games on the platform…well…if you thought there were a lot of massage games, clocks and fireplaces in the past….just wait.

What effect does this have on “Deep Blue”? Well, since I started this project with no real hopes of actually LAUNCHING the game on XNA, much less making a lot of money with it…it’s not going to effect it at all with any luck. I’m far enough along that launching it shouldn’t be a problem, and even with dwindling sales figures I would hope to at least make my $99 investment for the creators club…oh…excuse me…Windows App Dev subscription cost back. With any luck…it will make enough for me to purchase a Unity license and take my C# knowledge there.

It’s just disappointing that it appears the future of such a great program, or at least concept, may be fading away.

Sprite Batch Optimizations

2010-10-28T01:21:00.001-05:00

At this point of the process, with all the game play testing going on, I’m scanning the game for signs of things that make the frame rate hiccup. And at the same time I’m actually trying to break it with some of the test levels.

The good news is there’s just a few places where I’m seeing the frames skip a beat. So I headed over to the XNA….sorry…the “App Hub” boards and browse for optimization tips.

Turns out it’s best to keep a minimum number of sprite batch begin() and end() calls, as each one hits the performance a little. Good to know.

However, the bad news is, as far as I can tell. Certain things require new sprite batch calls to be executed and are unavoidable. Things like a change in the blend mode, or a pixel shader that uses a render to texture effect for an effect on the entire screen.

So, I spent some time last night scanning through all the draw statements and looking for ways to cut corners. I did catch one spot where I ended up drawing two copies of all the projectiles on top of themselves….which I wouldn’t recommend. And I think I caught one or two other places where I could merge a couple of sprite batches. But all-in-all, things were pretty tight.

I guess I’ll have to look somewhere else to untie my little performance knots.

Anyway….I just wanted to note. Since I misunderstood some earlier statements about sprite batches. Not only to you want to keep the number of sprite batches to a minimum, it’s ALSO the begin() and end() calls that slow things down a bit.

New Enemy Tests

2010-09-13T00:19:00.001-05:00

I’m very pleased to say I’ve got the initial tests for a new enemy type in the game. It’s an enemy that turns the color of the water, making it virtually invisible. That is until you shot him at which point he “decloaks”.

This will make the “shotgun” firing mode much more effective/essential when facing levels with a lot of these creatures.

The cool thing is I was able to pull of the cloaking/decloaking effect with pixel shaders.

So far it’s turned out very well, hopefully I’ll be able to post some video soon.

Video Intro Test - Check

2010-09-06T09:39:00.001-05:00

It’s a long weekend, Labor Day. And it’s been a pretty productive one. You may even say I’ve been “on a roll” (I should probably find some wood to knock on).

Load/Save
I’ve created a custom data class for save game data and successfully saved the data with an initial “hit S to save” test. Obviously, not the final method but still…a good first test.

Video Playback
This one actually went a lot smoother than I’d ever imagined given the amount of steps and specifics of it. Anyhow, I created a test video several seconds long, exported it, imported into Deep Blue and even hooked up inputs for a smooth audio and video fade to black when the player ‘skips’ the video.

I think I’ll probably still have to tweek the code so it doesn’t stretch when going to alternate resolutions (right now it’s filling the screen by grabbing the dimensions of the viewport), but that shouldn’t cause any problems.

New Enemy Attack Effect
The storyline of Deep Blue has these gigantic jellyfish that are electrically charged. The warnings are that coming into contact with said jellyfish could potentially short out the MANTA.

So, now when the player’s ship hits a jellyfish the player loses the ability to control his ship for 5 seconds. This is indicated visually by the lights on the ship going out.

It seems to have worked out pretty well and definitely is a hazard for the player.

Play, Play, Play
The core game mechanics are all in now and (it seems) working properly. So now it’s time to play. Serious game play testing has begun time to see how people react, how the play feels and adjust the overall game attributes and see if there’s too little, or too much.

Marine Superpower Poll

2010-08-07T23:05:00.000-05:00

Time for a quick poll. There are so many crazy abilities that deep sea creatures have...if you had a wish, which ability would you want?

Online Surveys & Market Research

Interpolation Success!

2010-08-03T01:56:00.001-05:00

I’m VERY HAPPY to say, especially after this weekend’s problems that I seem to be getting the hang of this basic Interpolator class stuff.

It’s working like a charm for the logo and splash pages and really makes a big difference in the presentation. I never did have the intro screens working quite right and now things are looking pretty sharp.

It’s too late here to keep moving forward tonight so I’m off to bed, but hopefully tomorrow I’ll be able to finish up the screen interpolations and hopefully start diving into the timer upgrade throughout the rest of the game.

On a minor note, I’ve also been chipping away at the new game art and UI.

Much Calmer Now

2010-08-02T00:30:00.001-05:00

Ok, after saying “To heck with it!”, and '”it” being Visual Studio 2008, 2010, and any kind of converter, and any way to create a new project…I gave creating a new project one last shot which resulted in the same apparent lock up as all the other attempts before. The difference is, this time I was so frustrated I left it ‘locked up’ and walked away to do something else on another computer.

Wouldn’t you know 3 minutes later Visual Studio 2008 decided it had thought long enough about creating a new project and…did. So I saved out that new project as a timer and interpolator test project to play around with and got back to important stuff…like playing Starcraft II.

So I had plenty of time to cool down after the 2 hours or so of completely wasted time earlier today, and I was able to go through Nick G’s tutorial in a breeze.

I’m pretty sure that system is the better way to go so the next step is to go back and try implementing it again in “Deep Blue”.

The bad news is the real possibility that I could be in serious trouble if I HAVE to upgrade “Deep Blue” to a Visual Studio 2010 project…since still, only one file successfully converted.

Hopefully I can finish it before the Visual Studio 2010 project becomes a requirement.

Full Circle

2010-08-01T13:51:00.001-05:00

Super. The good news I guess is that I didn’t lose any code for Deep Blue in all that conversion/backup nonsense. The bad news is that I’ve now come full circle and am now where I was a few hours ago. VS 2008 opens and runs Deep Blue, and I’m unable to create a new project.

Awesome.

I think I’m done for a while. Enough wasted time.

Upgrade Fail

2010-08-01T13:17:00.001-05:00

After installing Visual Studio Express 2010 I tried to open “Deep Blue’s” project which instantly starts the “project update” import function.

I’m annoyed to report that apparently only one file in the entire project successfully converted.

The good news: I found an installer still on my hard drive for Visual Studio 2008 and I’m reinstalling that again to see if I can open the project and hopefully create a new project after that test.

It couldn’t be easy could it.

Studio Express Update Day

2010-08-01T12:26:00.001-05:00

Well, a little unexpected, but it looks like today is Visual Studio Express Upgrade day. In attempting to follow Nick G’s tutorial on using the timer and interpolator class I’ve suddenly come to discover that my version of Visual Studio Express (2008 version for the record), has rebeled and refuses to create a new project.

Cute.

I tried the ‘repair’ feature in Windows…and that hasn’t helped. Sooooo, I’m currently downloading and installing Visual Studio 2010 and crossing my fingers that there aren’t major upgrade difficulties with existing projects.

Don’t let the fact that I started “Deep Blue” with Visual Studio 2005 give the illusion that the dev time has taken longer than it actually has. Granted….it’s take much longer than I’d originally thought…but not 5 years.

Timer Trouble

2010-07-31T19:52:00.001-05:00

Ugh, this new timer and interpolation thing is giving me troubles. Initially I wasn’t even interested in a new timer class. My timer class was working just fine. The problem is Nick’s new and improved interpolation class ~~comes with~~ requires a new and improved timer class.

Of course getting the new timer to not shatter the code that the rest of the game was using for a timer has been, problematic at best. And I haven’t even actually begun to start messing with the interpolation class yet.

Since I don’t see it as good practice to have two timer classes in a program I’m faced with one of two choices. Either rewrite the rest of the game elements that currently access my timer class to use the new timer class. Or, rewrite parts of the new timer class to accept the calls that are currently in the existing game.

The one good thing coming out of all of this is the educational value of it since I’m starting to get into delegates and lambda expressions which is new stuff to me.

Tweening...stuff

2010-07-25T20:29:00.000-05:00

I'm happy to report the further animation and collision tests have turned out positive, so with the new classes in place it's time to move on to the next thing. And after throwing a dart at the wall...it appears working in an interpolation class (or tweening class) is the next thing to tackle.

This interpolation class will be a utility class that will handle things like fading the screens up and down, moving menu items across the screen and who knows what else. So it will be a very handy thing to have around both now and in the future...so, let's get it right.

To start off I've been reading a lot from Nick Gravelyn's blog. And lucky for me he has an interpolation class that will serve as my base point of learning. You think that would be easy then huh? Well it appears I've got some reading up to do before I get rolling with it since Nick's using delgates and lambda expressions to implement his classes.

So for now I've got to get a handle on these two new elements...so, back to reading.

New Animation System in Place

2010-07-22T20:51:00.000-05:00

Initial tests indicate that I may have finally gotten the new animation system working properly...did I mention I'm not very good with math. Anyhow, as an added bonus it appears, believe it or not, that the collision system may be working as well. (I never saw that coming, but I'm not complaining.). But those are VERY initial tests in both cases.

So here's a brief history of the animation system throughout Deep Blue's development.

I. Square Sprites - The initial system was gleaned from the platformer demo in the Visual Studio Express Dev Library. It was the most specific, and limiting of all. It ONLY accounted for square sprite frames (with a 1:1 ratio) layed out in a horizontal line. While this may have worked perfectly and been very efficient for the platformer, you can imagine the limitations it put on sprite design.

II. Variable Ratio Sprites - So, the first thing I did was overload the method with an alternate version that accepted a frame width. I kept the sprites aligned in a horizontal row so that the frame height could be simply pulled from the sprite texture height.

That worked pretty well, except on the larger sprite animations which resulted in extremely long sprites (250 pixel wide frame * 30 frames = 7500 pixel wide sprite). And that just wasn't going to work. Even though it wasn't recommended, things animated pretty well....until the engine started checking for pixel collisions on a sprite of that size. It pretty much brought the game to 2 to 3 frames per second. So after posting and talking with the helpful crew on the XNA forums they suggested a basic rule that no sprite should be larger than 2048 in any dimension, and really, you should shoot for a 1024 max in most cases.

In order for that to happen...other than reducing all my larger animations to 3 frames....I had to lay out the frames in a square spritesheet.

III. Square Sprite Sheets - So my current solution is to lay out the frames in a 1:1 ratio sprite sheet with a max size of 2048 x 2048 pixels using a 1024 x 1024 texture when possible. After loooooooooots of broken math it appears to be working. So now I can have much more efficient sprite sheets and much better frame rates when lots of things are moving on the screen at once.

Each of the above variations was carried out by overloading the same Animation constructor so if I HAPPEN to have an animation that has 1:1 frames that is not over 2048 pixels in texture size I can create it easier than I can the custom square sprite sheet constructor.

All-in-all I'm pretty pleased with the results. It took a little longer than I'd hoped to figure it out, and I went through a bottle of Tylenol in the process but I'm glad to have it out of the way.

Let the Music begin.

2010-06-23T22:05:00.000-05:00

It's a little early, but I did get my little music studio up and running. It's a little awkward at the moment. The distance between my computer keyboard and monitor and the digital piano is far enough to remind me how old I'm getting.

Eventually we'll plan on mounting a second monitor in front of the piano but for now it just makes recording things a little more interesting.

The good news, everything is in working order and it's fun to be recording again.

Recent Progress

2010-06-02T20:51:00.000-05:00

Things have been moving along pretty well from the programming side. Recently, with a little guidance from "fr3shm4nt" on the XNA forums, I was able to get a HLSL shader working that included a lightmap for darkening the scene the deeper you dove. That was a pretty big step and I'll use some of the same techniques for the radial blast distortion when I get to that.

As things got darker deep underwater I also added the system in place for the bioluminecent glow of some of the enemies. So we should be set there.

I've also done a little tweeking to the treasure system to make it easier to read and apply, as well as cleaned up the animation system a little putting things in more logical places.

I'm still wrestling with the collision system, but refining the animation system was the first part to cleaning that up and getting it working properly.

On top of all the programming I've also been focusing in on the "Deep Blue" story. At this point it's looking pretty solid. The story has been a lot like painting...starting with big broad general strokes slowly refining and watching everything come together.

With all this focus on code and story it hit me recently that the one area that seems to be lagging behind is the art. Anyone else find that as ironic as I do? So anyhow...at some point soon I'll have to turn my attention back to the artistic side of things.

But that should be the easy part....right?

Deeper Blue

2010-05-08T17:53:00.000-05:00

The concept of "Deep Blue" began as an underwater submarine game in fact the folder on my drive still bears the original name "Sub Attack". Blue waters with light rays dancing through the scenes. But after seeing a few videos on YouTube about the deep sea creatures I though it would be more interesting for it to take place much deeper in the ocean. And that's when things really started to develop from a creature/vehicle concept.

The only problem, and one that's been really getting to me recently, is the fact that 30,000 feet underwater looks much different than 500 feet underwater. Visibility becomes a major game play element. Even with some of the story elements of Deep Blue that would add a little more light to the scene, the environment would be much different at that depth.

I've decided to shoot for something inbetween reality and game...which seems to be a common approach so far...and go for a much darker environment the deeper you go.

To pull this off, I hope, I'll use a pixel shader to darken the value of the entire screen then use glow textures with an additive value to 'light up' the lights on the MANTA or the bioluminecent creatures of the deep. At least that's the theory.

So far the darkening part seems to be working pretty well, now I've just got add glowing light sources back in. The shader started out as a game component, much like the bloom shader I'm using. But I needed more control over the draw order so the UI and messaging wouldn't be effected by the darkening so I switched it to a class.

Some Days

2010-04-16T21:42:00.000-05:00

Is it just me, or does it just seem impossible to program anything that works on some days. Other days things go smoothly, but days like today I can't seem to get my mind to kick into "program" mode.

Multiple Updates

2010-02-23T21:22:00.000-06:00

Although I have to admit, Star Trek Online has kept a little distracted from Deep Blue, it hasn't been all photons and phasers.

HLSL Pixel Shaders
Thanks to an XNA video session by Shawn Hargreaves I've started playing around with some simple pixel shaders in Deep Blue. Earlier I used a pixel shader to add a subtle underwater "glow" effect to the game. It looks a little like you've been swimming in a pool that's been a tad over chlorinated, but I like it.

I used a glow shader from the XNA library on the site so getting it in the game was the big accomplishment, however at the time it didn't mean that I had a good understanding...or any understanding of the HLSL programming.

Now, thanks in part to Shawn's tutorial, I've successfully implimented a slight water distortion effect to the game. One unexpected side effect has been the loss of my nice smooth 'fade from black' fade-ins and I'm still trying to track that one down.

The last shader I really want to work in would be a circular ripple distortion effect for ship explosions and the bubble burst weapon.

Weapons System Update
The new weapons system is about 90% in place. There's a couple of final things to work out but it's a much more flexible system than the way I originally approached it. There are now three types of ammo and three types of firing patterns. Each ammotype has it's own O2 cost, trajectory and damage with easy to modify numbers for game balancing.

Pixel Perfect Collisions
AH! And in another "big win" moment, initial tests are positive that I finally got the per pixel collision detection working, both on animated and non-animated sprites. Further testing is needed, but things are looking pretty promising right now.

I probably need to make an updated game video soon to show off all this progress. Possibly after I get in the treasure system.

Weapons Upgrade

2010-01-05T22:17:00.000-06:00

Rewriting the weapons system tonight to be more versatile, compact, and modular. Bubble sprites were being loaded in the level class, while the player and enemy classes had code for input, firing and updating...which worked, but was scattered at best.

Weapons are now built with a number of variables (rate of fire, ammo, and barrel location) which makes it easier to mix and match weapon types and projectiles.

The plan is to totally rework the 'weapon' class which had been stripped pretty bare from the last rework. Also the creation of a new 'ammo' class and a couple of new enums to handle the rate of fire and ammo type possibilities.

I still have some wonkiness going on with the per pixel collision detection on animated sprites but that's not surprising since it originated from a tutorial on static sprites. The collision fix comes at a later date.

Inspired By vs. Educational

2010-01-04T18:57:00.000-06:00

Last night I did a bit more research on creatures of the deep (thank you interweb, wikipedia and especially the magic of youTube). The good news is there is a LOT of REALLY cool stuff in the deep ocean...I mean the "Blow your mind, you've got to be making this up kinda stuff". For instance, did you know that at 3,000 feet deep, even though it is too deep for sunlight to reach, it is not a pitch black void. It's more a twinkling lightshow similar to the densest lightening bug swarm you've ever seen. Also, the tiny hatchet fish has photocells on it's underside that has the ability to change color to perfectly match the color of the light above him rendering him invisible from below. It's a built in cloaking device.

The bad news is, at the depths I was planning for the game anything not flashing would be pitch black. Which wouldn't make for a very fun game. I really wanted to game to be covertly educational, showing the diverse wildlife of the deep and some of the cool features about those creatures, but it's hard to be educational and blow the creatures away at the same time. Something seems to get lost there.

Result: I'm going to have to take some pretty big creative liberties with the environment and the enemies, and find some way to work in the factoid elements (possibly on each loading screen).

I think I'm also going to assign Katie to factoid research and copyrighting, cause some of these things are too cool and something she needs to discover for herself.

Happy 2010!

2010-01-03T23:50:00.000-06:00

So here we are at the beginning of a new year. Development is still moving along, slowly but moving none-the-less. And I continue to feel more familiar with C# and XNA as things progress. Recently in the XBox indie game library a company called Arkedo Studio has been releasing very well produced, high polish, yet relatively simple games. And I mean "simple" in the best way. The games are incredibly easy to pick up and play. Each has it's own cleverness and/or cuteness. And each has it's own look and feel, yet they all manage to maintain a 'family' style about them.

They are, in my opinion, some of the best, most professional games in the indie marketplace. They also are very limited in what they offer. There is no multiplayer, no save, no achievements or awards, and I have yet to see any kind of customization or personalization in the games. They are, in a way, a nod back to the 25 cent arcade days. Drop in a quarter, play till you die then start the thing all over again.

Of course, the down side to that approach (at least for the player) is they get very familiar with the beginning levels which they can grow tired of early. The up side is almost purely on the development side. It's a lot easier to develop a game when you don't have to worry about multiplayer, signing in, save points, etc.

Yet there are games, current games, that live almost entirely in the replayable world. The first that comes to mind is "Left 4 Dead". Sure, there's an initial exploration and discovery phase to the game the first couple of times through, but after that thanks to the dynamic in-game "director" the game retains a very high replay experience.

So, is there a way to combine the developmental efficiency of Arkedo Studio's "simple" approach with the dynamic replay value of Left 4 Dead? It might be a variation in weapons, ammo, level layout, depth (water), or a variety of other levers and switches

Over a Year

2009-12-27T20:57:00.001-06:00

Well, it's been a little over a year since I started development of "Deep Blue". And yes, it's true I sorta figured I'd be well on with my second game by now but I can't say it hasn't been worthwhile.

In the past year I've taken big steps in learning C#, the XNA development platform, as well as the basics of object oriented programming. I've read through 2 books on C# programming, 2 additional books that deal with C# programming specifically in XNA. I've done my fair share of tutorials, studied code from over a dozen other games. I've built a working version of "Deep Blue", then torn it down again to make a much more efficient version. All this in my 'free time'.

All in all, it's been a productive year, even if the game isn't launched yet. We'll see what 2010 holds. And yes, I'm crossing my fingers once again that the launch of Deep Blue is in there somewhere.

Back Up And Running

2009-12-15T01:08:00.001-06:00

Thanks to my wonderful in-house tech support department (a.k.a. my wife) I'm back up and running with a completely fresh and new hard drive and no viruses.

I successfully have both rectangle vs rectangle collision detection as well as per pixel collision detection test working in-game. Now to get the per pixel working while a rotate transform is taking place, so everything checks out with the spinning O2 tank.

I've also gone back and reworked the animation and animation player classes. They were designed with the assumption that all sprites would be squares which is not the case, pretty much across the board in "Deep Blue". But I still have another modification to make to it so my animation sprite sheets are not required to be laid out completely horizontally...like in the platformer sample.

So, more to do, but stuff is blowing up now and that's usually a good thing.

Visual Studio Malware???

2009-12-11T17:50:00.000-06:00

So, I've been fighting a virus on my computer and I used an anti-malware software to get rid of it. It did a full scan, found a number of things and removed them.

And now....I can't seem to build ANYTHING in Visual Studio Express. Every time I "build" it acts like it does a successful build, even to the point that the UI shifts into "debug" mode but no window with the game actually comes up to display anything.

And it no longer seems to be creating an exe in the debug folder of the project. I've tried this with other "sample" projects and even a "raw" new project where I should have gotten the light blue screen.....but nothin.

I've uninstalled/redownloaded/and reinstalled Visual Studio Express but no change.

So, now what?!

Version Problem Solved...sort of

2009-11-10T00:13:00.000-06:00

It took a bit more browsing through the XNA forums to find a 'solution' to my XACT audio problem. Here are a few important things to note.

First, the 'version' of the project is not entirely dictated by the 'version' of Visual Studio that you're currently using. The project is versioned when you start the project. I began "Deep Blue" with Game Studio 2.0 but then upgraded to 3.0 when it was mandated by the rules.

The problem with that is that XACT 3.0 wasn't compatible with Game Studio 3.0...even though they were a part of the same download...mmm...yeah....but anyhow. They fixed the compatibility issue with Game Studio 3.1 so I upgraded my version of Game Studio. But that didn't mean I upgraded the project...which remained at version 3.0, even though I was developing it in 3.1 at the time. So I had to manually 'upgrade' my project to 3.1.

Solved.....right? Not quite.

Even after doing this I got some really odd version errors on the audio so I decided to open XACT 3.0 and rebuild the sound banks again. But that didn't seem to help. I confirmed that the files were being overwritten (updated), but it didn't seem to have any effect.

I had to manually delete the compiled sound bank files and THEN rebuild the sound banks to finally get the project to compile without error. So now it all works, but it still doesn't make much sense.

Version Problems...

2009-11-08T23:33:00.001-06:00

See, and I was going to make this post about how cool and awesome the XACT audio tool was for sound engineering. But instead, this post is about how screwy version control and backwards compatibility can be.

I'm having some odd version problems with XACT and Game Studio 2.0 or 3.0 (it's hard to tell which is causing the problems). The XACT audio tool is what enables you to create sound banks for XNA games.

At this point, one solution (sort of) appears to be to make a new sound bank with all the sounds in it. Which believe it or not is a little more complex than simply including a bunch of wav files in one collection. And honestly, that was supposed to be the 'cool' part...unless I have to do the whole thing twice.

Bottom line...or as much as I can tell right now...is that I began this project with Game Studio 2.0, which came with the XACT 2.0 tool. Then I had to upgrade to Game Studio 3.0 (all XNA submissions must be in 3.0 at this time). Well Game Studio 3.0 came with the XACT 3.0 audio tool...HOWEVER...the 3.0 audio tool was not compatible with Game Studio 3.0. (Yeah, I have no idea how THAT passed any kind of QA). This is an error they fixed in Game Studio 3.1. So you'd think everything would be cool (now). But it looks like (judging from the XNA forums), that if you start a project with an older version of Game Studio...it won't accept newer file format of XACT.

Ok, so worst case is that I have to recreate all the audio I just finished in XACT 3.0....back in the 2.0 version since any sound bank created with XACT 2.0 seems to work fine. ACCEPT for the funny thing call the XACT auditioning tool which is another app that runs in the background along with XACT that enables you to listen to the sounds you're creating in XACT. Without the auditioning tool...you can't hear a single thing of what you're creating. The totally cool and awesome part now is...the 3.0 version of the auditioning tool deleted/overwrote the 2.0 version. So now, if I try to use the XACT 2.0 tool to recreate the sounds....I can't listen to a single thing I'm doing.

So....a bit stuck on audio at the moment. Still searching the forums for a better answer than the one I've found so far.

My First Game Component

2009-11-07T15:40:00.000-06:00

I'm very pleased to say I've completed my first independent Game Component. I created a messaging system for common message types. So far that includes floating score bubbles and sinking messages that I'll use in "Deep Blue" for things like "Ready, Dive!" or "Level 1".

It's a message system that is complete independent of the rest of the game code. It's easily integrated into any future game with....I think 2 lines of code. It's also something I can easily build new message types into with simple additional classes.

Things are moving along pretty well.

Unity 3d is now FREE

2009-11-05T20:31:00.000-06:00

A 3d engine that's caught a lot of attention lately from the likes of EA and myself is Unity 3d. Mr. Chris Griffith at work showed it off a couple of years ago. At that time it was Mac only, which didn't help us out much, but it's come a long way since then.

The MMO "Fusion Fall" was created with it, as is the upcoming Tiger Woods Online among other games. Anyhow...the point to this post...as the title would suggest is that they have opted to drop the $200 license fee for the indy license.

The other cool thing is that they "Unity" has reported that it is...or will soon be...compatible with the 360. Sweet! The only real question is whether or not the 360 export will be included with the indy version.

I'll definitely be playing around with it sometime in the future, and researching it as a possible 3d engine.

Signed In!

2009-10-29T00:17:00.000-05:00

Another little victory. I've now programmed in Xbox Live sign in to the beginning of the game, and it's even pulling in the players Xbox Live Gamertag name and displaying it where "Player 1" was being shown.

I know, it's nothing huge...but a nice little step none-the-less.

To Multiplay, Or Not To Multiplay

2009-10-23T21:29:00.000-05:00

Currently weighing the value and use of multiplayer in "Deep Blue". Does it make sense? What does it add (if anything)? What does it require? What does it take away? Is there a "gotta have" reason for it?

Ever since early on in the play testing process Connor made the request for multiplayer. However, since this was my first shot into XNA and C# the best I've been shooting for at this point was couch play with two player co-op in two MANTA subs. Couch play seemed only logical since, barring some incredible miracle, I don't see "Deep Blue" having enough concurrent game plays to support a XBox Live multiplayer mode.

But the domino effect of including simple couch play will be felt throughout the game. How do we allow two players in the water and still have a balanced game that isn't twice as easy with two people? Then there's the whole process of registering two controllers and possibly two XBox Live accounts. Some of the UI elements (like showing the current depth) become confusing with two players.

At this point I think I'd rather toss multiplayer this time around and possibly use that time to create an awards/achievement system and more story elements.

I guess I'll run it past the game design boss, Connor, and see if he'll let it go. I just don't want to add multiplayer if it doesn't truely add something to the game play. Having it just to have it, does not increase the fun.

October Video Update

2009-10-12T23:38:00.000-05:00

Here's a quick look* at how things stand. Obviously the new collision detection isn't in and I had made a noob mistake while rendering the latest rammer enemy which left the annoying light halo around the outter edge of the ship.

See the few previous posts for a short breakdown of what is new and/or changed.

Anyhow, progress is being made. More to come.

(* Facebook folks may have to follow the link: http://deepbluexna.blogspot.com )

Connor the Game Designer

2009-10-12T23:02:00.000-05:00

Now that I've got a level system in place for "Deep Blue" I introduced Connor to the level editor, basically just a .txt file inside Studio Express. I laid out the rules for him of what each level needed to be valid and showed him how to do a build so he could test. So I put him in the role of both level designer and head of Q.A.

And here's Connor working on very intense level design.

....followed only moments later by Connor explaining to me all the things that were wrong.

Yes..."Deep Blue" still has a long way to go.

He's ALIVE!!!!

2009-10-12T15:48:00.000-05:00

Sorry, I couldn't resist. I'm referring to the enemy ships that are now animated (swimming). I used the "Sample Platformer" game that came with Studio Express as a base for the sprite animation system.

Even better, using the level system I've got enemy placement in the level with multiple enemy types, one animated and one non-animated. So now I guess I'd better get to work on working in a few more enemy types to play with.

I've got Connor working hard on level design, he's working in Studio Express on a .txt file for enemy placement. He's going through all the create/test/alter cycle to get things the way he wants them.

Hopefully I'll get a video up soon to show progress.

Deep Blue 2.0

2009-10-04T13:37:00.000-05:00

Things are moving pretty well with the restructuring. Here's a list of some of the changes, both big and small.

- (new) Logo screen with an image that may be swapped with a video before launched.
- (new functionality) Pop up windows ("How to Play" and "Credits") support multiple pages and an "open/close" state.
- (change) Projectiles are now stored in a List instead of an array to support infinite shots and stop the rubberbanding on the shotgun weapon.
- (new) Level object created, to support actual level design over the random spawn style game. Levels are designed and read in from a .txt file.
- (change) Enemies are now stored in a List instead of an array to support a variable number of enemies per level, as part of the level design change.
- (change) various cleanups of methods and classes.
- (change) and the big change was that the whole system is built in a modular fashion, instead of 90% of the code being found in one file. Individual classes for game screens, pickups, enemies, player, weapons, UI...etc. This was the entire reason for the teardown, so that the code could much more easily be modified for future games. It's also much easier to read through.

Still have a ways to go, but things are headed in the right direction now.

Making Progress

2009-10-01T00:23:00.000-05:00

Mr. Montgomery's solution seems to be working. After commenting code and excluding classes throughout the project "Deep Blue" is up and running again. I've got a logo screen, splash screen, main menu, game over screen, and the beginnings of the main game screen complete with controllable MANTA ship.

The work ahead still looks pretty daunting if I step back and look at the whole thing in it's entirety, but plugging things in one little step at a time hasn't been too bad so far.

I just hope all the extra time it's cost me on "Deep Blue" will be worth it (both for the completion of Deep Blue and for the next game...themed around the same engine).

Back at it, with a new strategy

2009-09-24T20:39:00.000-05:00

Ok, so although I've had a rush of other things that have popped up...like Cub Scouts and Scribblenauts...I have to say I've been a little discouraged with "Deep Blue". I had the goal of breaking the game and restructuring it, then putting it back together. Well, I managed to do the first part reeeeaaaally well. Maybe a little too well.

I've had trouble finding a way to approach "fixing" the code. I begun following the flow of the game from the beginning and fixing things that were broken along the way, but with the whole thing a wreck it made it impossible to compile and thus, test.

Then I tried looking at the debug code and fixing things one class at a time, beginning with the class with the least amount of errors. I found it proved very hard to tell if I was making progress or not. Again, without the ability to compile, it's hard to get a good feel for progress.

I THINK the restructuring was going pretty well. It definately cleaned up the main game class a ton, but I had no way to test.

So I spoke with a couple of friends at work skilled in programming and Mr. Jim Montgomery (honestly one of the most impressive sounding names at work, you really have to say the whole thing) suggested commenting virtually everything out in the main game class, just to get the game to compile and slowly turn things on one piece at a time.

So that's was the new plan. Even if I had to comment it down to a blue screen, I was going to get it to run again.

After my initial tests, things seem a little better than the worst case senario...after a ton of commenting I've returned to a logo screen, to a splash screen, to a menu screen (and the menu still works). And now begins the slow process of turning things back on and fixing as I go.

Sucker Shark

2009-09-11T23:10:00.001-05:00

Initial 3d model of an enemy tentatively called the "Sucker Shark". They travel in packs, are quick and agile and attach themselves to the players ship sucking the oxygen out of it.

The oversized reflective eye is required for the deep sea low light environment.

The new book has arrived

2009-09-11T00:14:00.001-05:00

The new xna book I ordered has finally arrived and I'm definately going to have to step up my progamming skills to put it to use but it looks like it will be very help on many fronts. I really like the way it's presented, in a "problem/solution" type of manner. It definately wasn't designed to be read through in a linear manner. It's more bite-sized bits of programming.

The majority of the book seems to be centered around 3d games, which will come in handy later, but there are also several lessons or segments on things I've been wondering about for "Deep Blue", such as save game states, game components, and signing in to xbox live.

So I'll be reading through sections this weekend.

Good 'n Broke

2009-09-06T21:48:00.000-05:00

Oh yeah, she's good 'n broke now captain.

And I now have a plan "A" and "B". Plan A: is I continue trying to straighten things out as is (a plan that's taking much long than expected). Plan B: I've got my new XNA book coming in and maybe I'll find something that will help and make things click in there...but that isn't supposed to arrive until the next Friday :(

So, back to plan "A" for now.

Purchased a new XNA book

2009-09-03T23:19:00.000-05:00

Just ordered a new book from Amazon: "XNA 3.0 Game Programming Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach (Expert's Voice in XNA)"

The bad news is, it's not going to get here before my extended Memorial Day vacation is over. Whenever it gets here I guess we'll see if I've graduated past the "beginner" XNA developer stage.

Working on more concept art at the moment centered around the game's story.

Stone Squid Animation

2009-09-03T09:47:00.000-05:00

Here's a look at the initial animation test for the heavily armored "Stone Squid".

I has no ranged attack but instead rams the player with it's heavy protective forward shell.

(rss feed folks may have to follow this link to view the video http://deepbluexna.blogspot.com)

Music is excerpt from an original piece for the game.

Christmas Lights...

2009-09-02T23:40:00.000-05:00

I like Christmas lights, I really do. All bright and shiny, flashing and twinkling. They really set the mood for the holidays. However, putting the lights up may be one of my most disliked tasks. You dig out the box from the attic, open it up and pull out a huge ball of wires and bulbs.

No matter how well you TRIED to pack everything up the year before, it always ends up a mess. A mess you spend probably just as much time untangling, sorting, and testing as you do actually hanging the lights up.

"Deep Blue" right now is a lot like that ball of wires and bulbs. It's going to take a lot of untangling, sorting and testing to get things all straightened out. But I still believe that I will be able to get it all done, and when I do it will finally be done in a way that will be easy to adapt to and use in the future.

I'm studying the platform sample that was included in the XNA documentation at the moment. It's something I probably should have done, and would have done earlier had I know where to find it. Anyhow, I'm reading up on loading in an external file for level design and also still trying to encapsulate the classes in an intelligent and helpful way.

I'd say "cross your fingers" but at the moment, I don't think I need anything else crossed.

Another major restructuring

2009-08-25T22:06:00.000-05:00

Crossing my fingers and toes as I'm about to hit the code with a great big sledgehammer with hopes that I can come out with a better structure...and not shatter the entire thing.

Major refactoring and encapsulation about to take place to improve the engine and lay a better foundation for the next game.

...here goes...

Slugging through

2009-08-23T16:10:00.000-05:00

Currently still going through a series of studying other XNA games and tutorials and then revisiting code for "Deep Blue". At this point I don't think there's much of the original code left but that's probably a good thing.

For the record I guess it's worth noting my reference material up to this point...since I had no C# experience prior to this.

It would be hard to list all the online tutorials I've read through so for the moment I'll stick to the books.

XNA Game Studio 2.0 - by Rob Miles. A very basic good that was a good first look into XNA but falls a little short full production. It's a "friendly" read.
Beginning C# by Karli Watson - Lays the basics of C# in more tech terms than the book above but about half of it is reserved for .net and Windows apps. Thanks for Matt S. for letting me borrow the book.
Visual C# 2005 Step-by-step - byJohn Sharp. This one was actually paired up with XNA Game Studio 2.0. It too is a more serious look at C# and spends a little time with Windows apps. All in all it's very comparable to Beginning C#.

At this moment, I feel I've got a pretty good understanding of some of the basic concepts of C# but still lack how to tie everything together. Creating classes, moving a player around the screen and having him blow things up is working fine, but it still feels a like it's not 'put together' quite right yet. So, back to reading and reviewing.

A Few Underwater Facts

2009-08-21T21:04:00.000-05:00

Finishing up an illustration commission has paused serious development of "Deep Blue", although I'm still able to get a little research and art done.

Here are some interesting bits I've learned throughout the course of the project. - 71% of the Earth's surface is covered by water.

Bouyancy of an object underwater decreases as depth increases.
We know more about the surface of the moon than the deepest parts of the ocean.
Modern submarines create breathable oxygen by electrolysis of water.
A fathom is 6 ft deep.
Water shooting from a deep thermal vent can reach temperatures of over 750 degrees but the extreme high pressure keeps it from boiling.
In extremely deep water sound travels at almost a mile a second, over 5 times the speed of sound in the air.
Most scientists agreed that life could not be sustained at the bottom of the deepest parts of the ocean. They were proved wrong when two men saw fish swimming at the bottom of the Marianas Trench at 35,761 ft below sea level. That was in 1960. They sat on the bottom of the ocean for 20 minutes before starting the 4 hour trip back to the surface. That was the last time anyone has been to the bottom.

If nothing else, I'm learning a lot about the ocean and underwater technologies.

In-Game Screenshots

2009-08-06T22:23:00.000-05:00

New in-game screenshots from "Deep Blue" have been added to the web album. This is the first look at the user interface...most of it at least.

Video Update

2009-08-06T18:41:00.000-05:00

So, here's what I've got at the present time. It's coming along but there's still quite a bit of work to be done on it. I did comment out the Co-Op mode and a few other things that still weren't solid yet. The question being thrown around here is...whether or not to submit it to the XNA contest.

Do I think it has any shot at placing? No. Not in a million years. But here we are. It's our 15 year anniversary tonight and we're preping to head out for dinner and possibly Six Flags. Danielle commented that if I submitted it that it would feel that I was doing something halfway, which is something I never do. And I have to agree with her.

And I guess that pretty much sums it up right there. I'll post my would be contest entry video and screenshots here but I think I'd feel better overall not sending them in. It's just not...me.

So...enjoy all and the development will continue. Having too much fun.

Successful Music test...sort of

2009-08-06T14:08:00.000-05:00

The good news is that I finally got the two programs to talk to each other in order to combine the looped and MIDI music. The bad news is it took way to long for what was supposed to be a short cut for the score.

Sooooo, I may end up using the technique for the final music, but for this first cut it will be all looped. :(

Musical Score

2009-08-06T10:52:00.000-05:00

At the moment, trying to throw together a quick musical score for the game. For now it will serve more as a placeholder and reference for tempo and feel more than anything else. The full score to come later.

I am trying something a little different even with the short timeline. I'm experimenting with going half loops and half original music to see if I can combine the two and see if that won't give a less mechanical...loopy feel to the score.

A Few Days Focus on Deep Blue

2009-08-05T22:56:00.000-05:00

I'm taking a few days off my normal job. The main reason is it's our 15 year anniversary, but as an added bonus it also gives me a little time to focus on "Deep Blue". The XNA contest is wrapping up this Thursday (ironically the very same day as our anniversary) and I'd like to submit it to the contest...not so much that I think it has any chance of placing, but more because I'd like the 4 month subscription for entering. :)

Besides, if it wasn't for the contest in the first place I never would have gotten this far in the development. So I've spent today working on pickups and screen flow and taking out a few things (such as co-op) for the contest entry.

"Deep Blue" won't be..."done" by Thursday, but at least I'd like to have it in a stable and playable state.

Things taken out that I would still love to include in the final version.
- Signing in the the players to XBox Live.
- An achievement/ranking system, with a save state.
- a "Level" system with multiple levels including bad guys and environments
- and local co-op (saving XBox Live co-op for another project)
- oh...and a better timing system for entering and exiting a game.

So with all that it still may be a little while until "Deep Blue" is ready to hit the marketplace but if I can get all those in then I feel it will be a very "complete" game.

Enemy Mine...

2009-08-04T03:18:00.000-05:00

...no, not the Dennis Quaid movie, these are simply proximity/radius enemies in Deep Blue. Whether or not they have movement yet is still to be tested.

Enemy Ship 2

2009-08-04T03:12:00.000-05:00

Fresh on the heels of the armored enemy ZBrush design is this second enemy ship. This ship, which is still unnamed, is much smaller and faster than the bulky armored ship. It's oversized claws are inspired by the real-world "Pistol Crab" which can essentially create a sonic burst with it's claws so powerful it actually creates LIGHT and stuns it's prey (soon to be dinner) from a distance. Seriously, I'm not making this up, search for it online.

Anyhow, just like the Pistol Crab, the claws here are an excuse to have a ranged weapon. Yes, the first of our bad guys that actually fires back at you.

Armored Enemy Ship

2009-08-01T15:35:00.000-05:00

Here's the inital design of the armored enemy ship. The ship has no projectiles, but it's heavily armored in the front to ram the player's ship. Created and rendered in ZBrush this is a untouched render just showing a swarm of ships deep underwater.

Enemy Ship Design in ZBrush

2009-08-01T15:17:00.000-05:00

I've taken a variety of approaches to enemy ship design for Deep Blue. I've tried traditional concept sketches, an experimental drawing program called Alchemy, and speed painting and so far...I still haven't been able to produce anything I really like.

I'm going to something that is a combination of vehicle and organic and something that could be a never before seen species of sea creature, or extra terrestrial origin. So today I tried something a little different and gave a 3d sketch a shot using ZBrush.

And I'm happy to report, the results are MUCH closer to what I was hoping for. Take a look at this little video above to see how it developed. The colors may be a bit off but I think I've finally managed the right balance of natural/ship and creature/alien.

Co-Op has begun

2009-07-28T23:19:00.000-05:00

Since it was the number one requested feature by my co-game designers (that would be my 6 and 9 year old kids Connor and Katie), and since they obviously weren't going to stop asking about it until the game included it, I'm happy to announce the two player co-op game mode on "Deep Blue".

I haven't quite figured out exactly how that's going to all play out but at the moment we've got a pair of MANTA subs swimming through the water and blasting everything in sight.

What this also means is that sometime in the not-to-distant future I'll need to pick up another USB 360 controller for testing on the PC. I can already tell that running from the computer room to the living room to test multiplayer isn't going to fly.

Huge Cleanup and Big XNA Announcement

2009-07-24T21:04:00.000-05:00

While the details of the game play and rules are starting to take shape, I'm now in the middle of a huge process of breaking out a lot of the code to external classes...and praying I don't break the whole thing in the process.

I've done a few tests centered around one of the simpler classes and I think I'm ready to start tearing the bigger pieces out. *cross your fingers...mine are*

Along with the code side of things, I've been playing around with various icons for the different pickups in the game. Hopefully I'll have something to post soon on that.

On other news I was pretty pumped to hear the details about the upcoming changes to the XNA Community Games. Among them are a global name change, free tokens for marketing purposes, update pushes for existing games, and a price structure change.

XNA Community Games will soon be known as "XBox Live Indie Games". I think the name change is purely for restart purposes and honestly with all the 'non-games' that currently sit in the top 10 list I'm very surprised it wasn't renamed "XBox Live Apps".

Very soon when a new game is launched on the marketplace the game creator will be given 50 "tokens" to distribute to publications and...whoever they wish...to help promote the game and spread the word. I think this is a great call...at the very least it means I won't have to charge my friends and family in order to let them play the full game.

Something I had no idea, until it was spelled out in the new press release, is that current XNA games on the marketplace really have to way of letting people know an update has been made to the game. The best they could do was post something on a website and hope existing users saw it. Soon, they'll be able to notify current customers of an update to their game when the game launches....I'm guessing very much in the same way normal games do now.

And the final change, which caused the largest ripples in the water, was the pricing structure change. Instead of games being priced at either 800, 400, or 200 Microsoft points, the new prices will be either 400, 240, or 80 Microsoft points. One hard rule is that if your game is larger than a 50M download it can't be priced at 80MSP.

This announcement got quite a few people worked up on the Creator's Club site but I think it's a good thing. Some say it will open the doors to flood the marketplace with 'crap' games. Well, I'd hate to say it, but that door may have swung open quite a while ago. If I see another 'massager or image viewer' app referenced as a 'game' I'm gonna have to hurt someone. The Creator's Club, I believe, was created for aspiring and hobbiest game designers to let their visions loose on the world and bring their ideas to life. While the current tools may not allow 'everyone' to fullfill this dream (with a decent hill to climb) it is, at it's base, aimed at hobbiests. Make these games because they're fun and/or challenging to make, or to use it you create a game to help you break into the gaming industry, or...simply because you've always wanted to...not because you've got a multi-million dollar businessplan behind it.

Video Update

2009-07-18T17:07:00.000-05:00

Long overdue, but finally I've put together a tiny video update. Some things are still obviously placeholder, such as the UI and the enemies, but things are starting to fall together.

As all the basic pieces come together and playtesting the full experience really gets moving, a real game is beginning to emerge.

When I began, I started trying to select the simplest of game mechanics, trying not to bite off too much. I started off with a single player, controlled by a thumbstick, had him fire a single weapon and blast as many bad guys as he could. Calculate a score and we've got a basic game. Mission Complete!

However, as I began to feel a little more comfortable with C# and XNA other ideas began to pop up, ideas that didn't seem to hide behind mounds of terrifying C# code, so I figured I'd give them a shot. Throw in an oxygen resource and cost/benefit mechanic...done. How about a secondary bubble burst weapon....done. What about a depth mechanic that ties to the oxygen usage...done.

Step back and things begin to really shape up. Then more ideas hit that seem to make sense, other enemy/hazard types. More weapon variations. Upgradable ship node with an associated economy system.

IF I can actually manage to get all that in "Deep Blue". IF I manage to write to code to make it all behave properly. And IF makes the game more fun...then this little experiment of a project may become something a little bit more.

Variable Screen Resolution...

2009-07-12T12:33:00.000-05:00

....should be close to "step 1" when you start planning and programming your game. Variable screen resolutions and their effect on the game is a pretty global change and it's much better to think about that up front than having to sort through your code later and try to correct everything....like I'm having to do now.

Variable screen resolution doesn't simply effect layout (although that would probably be enough of a hassle). It effects game object speeds (or apparent speed), as well as any limitations based on screen position. The goal, of course, is to have your game play the same on any resolution. That, so far, appears to be much easier said than done.

Trust me, you're going to want to plan ahead on this. I know I will next time.

Successful Sound on the 360

2009-07-06T18:32:00.000-05:00

Well I've completed my initial sound tests which included a looping sound effect for the ambient underwater noise as well as a full deploy to the 360 and all went relatively well.

The sound levels need to be worked out but they were all definately there.

I'm still having some horizontal 'stretching' issues going on with all the graphics that I'll have to look into. It would make a certain amount of sense with the background stretching...but all the graphics...something weird is going on.

But yea for sound!

And then there was sound

2009-07-06T10:57:00.000-05:00

I've got a pretty decent amount of experience with audio creation in my past. So I have to admit, it is a little bit of a relief to step away from the "bold/new" of C# and get back on more familiar ground of music and sound effects.

Even being more familiar to me, I was a little concerned about getting audio into XNA with all the posts and questions/troubles that I've seen people had about audio on the forums. Luckly...so far, knock on wood, things are going remarkably smoothly. Honestly, I really like the authoring tool.

I've created a few simple sounds for the gameplay and the UI, create a few variations on certain sound effects and tweek volume and pitch levels so it all blends together correctly. The two remaining big steps I have to take with the audio are longer audio files, such as background music, and testing out the files on the 360. But so far, everything has worked out painlessly on the PC.

Kodu Fun

2009-07-05T19:41:00.001-05:00

For those of you aspiring game designers out there (especially the ones without a masters degree in programming), I highly recommend checking out the "Kodu Game Lab" available for the xBox 360 on the Live Marketplace.

It released last week and is a great way for starting game creators to get their ideas going. All authoring is done on the 360 through a series of circular menus and iconic programming. The programming feels very "LEGO". It's very easy and quick to get a game up and running.

There are of course limitations. You're not going to be creating Halo any time soon on Kodu, but for simple games it's a lot of fun. There are currently around 200 3d assets to choose from (I've heard...but personally I find that number a little high) and the dev crew did a good job of creating assets for a wide range of games (sports, racing, shooter, platformer...etc.). It's a little like going to Toys R Us and grabbing a lot of generic playing pieces out of the board game isle and throwing them all in a box

There is a free trial, but the program itself is $5.00, but well worth it for the time you'll spend playing around.

Hopefully in the future they'll release 'asset packs' which will enable you to have even more items to play with.

All Hail 4-Day Weekends

2009-07-04T16:39:00.000-05:00

Thanks to the 4th of July, I've got a 4 day weekend and I'm determined to make a good amount of headway on "Deep Blue". I'm currently finishing up the main menu screen and dealing with resolution variations for different TV's .

I'm pretty much cycling through the following steps: program something, play/debug, then review for clean up.

Some of this C# must be sinking in because the amount of "what the heck was I thinking!" during the review process has gotten much less frequent.

Soon I'll turn back to design, user interface specifically, and story. I'm not looking for an epic backstory here, just a little something that makes a little sense for what you're doing underwater.

But for now...off to July 4th barb-b-que and fireworks.

Still poking along at about 1/4 speed

2009-06-28T16:07:00.000-05:00

Work had me pretty tied up last week but this weekend I've managed to get a little done on the main menu screen. Special thanks to Matt Schmulen for his assistance on casting, and then for getting things really rolling on the main menu.

I also have the oxygen tank pickup in the game but I need to place a timer on the respawn of it. Right now it spawns another one the instant the first one leaves the screen for any reason.

I'll post an updated video once I get a few more art updates in place.

Inspired By

2009-05-31T13:25:00.000-05:00

I've posted a folder filled with art and styles that inspired "Deep Blue". Mainly from the old TV show "Sea Quest" and the deep ocean look of "the Abyss".

Other reference included a number of images from underwater animal life and sunken ship wrecks.

inspired by

Reading....analyzing....reading....analyzing

2009-05-31T09:53:00.000-05:00

Slacking around? Off the job? No way. Even though I haven't had the change to post updates recently I'm still pretty heavily focused on "Deep Blue". Right now I'm doing a lot more reading on C# and studying a lot of code provided on the Creators Club site.

The funny thing is, it seems everyone has pretty much their own way of doing things. In all the samples I've looked at I have yet to see two people handle the structuring of the code the same. The good news is, I've managed to not break anything in all the refactoring going on. The bad news is, it doesn't look terribly different than a couple of weeks ago.

But since this is a learning exercise I'm not bound by any timeline and it is helping me get a much clearer picture of C# and XNA.

Conversion to XNA 3.0

2009-05-17T20:58:00.000-05:00

Well I jumped in a little earlier than I originally planned to and converted "Deep Blue" from XNA 2.0 to XNA 3.0 and to my surprise, and relief, it was pretty painless. The only fall out seems to be a couple of warning messages during deployment which I'll track down pretty soon.

Deep Blue on the 360

2009-05-16T22:39:00.000-05:00

I signed up for the XNA Creators Club 2009 game contest, if for nothing else than to get the free 12-month trial XNA membership. Deep Blue would most likely not be something I would enter into a contest like this but getting the trial membership enables me to once again run Deep Blue on our 360.

I was relatively surprised that deploying to the 360 went so smoothly. There were a couple of things that popped up as different than designed. The first of which was the color. It was much more saturated on the HD TV. Most of the time that would be a good thing, but I think it went a little overboard on the explosions. I'll end up darkening and desaturating the explosion sprite a little.

The other surprise was that all the graphics seemed to be stretched. If I remember correctly, that would make sense for the background and title screen, but not so much for the ship sprites. So I'll have to take another look at that and see what's going on.

Fun with particles

2009-05-13T01:31:00.001-05:00

Moving along again. I've got bad guy ships exploding, a simple scoring system rolling and I just finished up a very helpful tutorial from the XNA site, by jFoss on creating a particle system. It was a lengthy tutorial, but well worth it. I think I managed to absorb about 75%-80% of it.

Tomorrow night may be time to turn a little focus back to the art side so I can get better looking enemies and particles in there.

The particle system tutorial is a part of the extra credit tutorials on the 2d game lessons.
http://creators.xna.com/en-US/education/gettingstarted/bg2d/ExtraCredit

Back at it

2009-05-10T12:07:00.000-05:00

After five months off I finally have a little time to throw some more attention to Deep Blue. I'm experimenting with some alternative ways of doing ship design for the enemies, as well as still finishing out the programming of the core game mechanics. I'm putting the scrolling background on the back burner until I get the rest of the core game play worked out. And I've got to get the menu screen set up with buttons.

So...diving back in (sorry, I couldn't help it).

3 Week Video - a Little Late

2009-04-02T07:42:00.000-05:00

I got to reviewing the Deep Blue folder and trying to get caught up to where I last left off before I ran out of free time here and I found this video. The video shows progress after the first 3 weeks. I really have no idea why I didn't post it before, unless I was waiting to add one last clip of something.

But since I've now forgotten what that would have been, I'm going to go ahead and post it.

So, a little late...here's the video of where the game was/is after 3 weeks of development. I hope to be able to spend some more time on it in the not too distant future, but we'll just see how busy other things go.

Happy New Year All!

2009-01-02T09:40:00.000-06:00

Ok, the holidays have now passed, like a hurricane...but that's a much longer post, and I'm going to try to get things rolling again with "Deep Blue".

We last left off with around 50 hours of work done which included a little of everything, art, documentation, even programming.

For the first post of the new year here's our look at the very valuable air tank pickup, both large and in-game size.

The Holidays Caught Up

2008-12-07T17:21:00.000-06:00

....and the holidays have officially caught up with me. Resulting in a temporary pause in Deep Blue. About the only thing I've been able to continue doing is reading more about C# (which at least is something).

But for now it seems my focus has turned to gifts art and commissions.

Can't Seem to Stop

2008-11-29T14:07:00.000-06:00

I know I said I was taking a break this week to handle other matters, but with the holiday and the few day's off from work I couldn't resist. Just having too much fun.

Bad me, I went into this week without any weekly goals (other than not working on the game). So from that stand point I guess I failed. I think I split my hours between programming and design about half and half this week. From the programming side I created a method to fade screens in, added enemy ships moving through the water, fixed the player's controls, added 'gravity' to the player sub and did a good deal of refactoring of code tidying up things. Names of many things to changed to support multiplayer play and I made a gameScreen class to make it easier to make screens like the splash screen, title screen, and game over screens. I also dropped some basic values and display for the in-game UI elements.

From the design side I wrapped up version one of the player sub, called the "Manta", which resembles the shape found in the game logo. It was a tough decision whether to go with hand painted art, or 3D rendered art. I actually really like the look of the painted background so we're sticking with a hand painted look for all the art elements.

Here's the final art, many times larger than what you'll see in the game but I felt the extra details didn't hurt.

From Development of "Deep Blue"

Hopefully, by the end of this weekend I'll have an update video for "Week 3".

"Manta" concept art

2008-11-26T16:17:00.000-06:00

I thought I'd go ahead and post the latest player ship sketches. The ship, tentatively called the "Manta", was obviously inspired by the underwater dynamics of a manta ray. It seats two people and is propelled by a central turbine on the underside of the ship and twin rotating turbines on each wing.

From Development of "Deep Blue"

Large lights run along the front edge of the wings which are essential for deep sea visibility.

Initially I had a "tail" at the back of the ship that acted like a rudder, but with the twin rotating turbines I didn't see manuverability as a problem.

Holiday Break

2008-11-25T21:32:00.000-06:00

Unfortunately, with the holidays coming up, and the fact that I'm in need of a little cash "Deep Blue" is going to have to be put on hold temporarily while I hit a couple of illustrations.

It's a little disappointing since I feel things were rolling along at a nice pace. Hopefully stepping away won't handicap me too much once I get a chance to start up again.

I'll go ahead and post the ship concept sketches as well as the new title screen and main menus.

Week 2 Summary

2008-11-24T07:15:00.000-06:00

Last week I put together a 3 page initial treatment for "Deep Blue" outlining the key game mechanics. I designed a preliminary logo for the game and carried it over to a new title screen. I designed the "How to Play" modal window. I was able to make a lot of progress on the player sub, but nothing really solid yet for the enemy subs.

From a programming standpoint I discovered the source of my instant movement on the player sub...I'd left an initial velocity test variable. I was able to drop in some testing text into the game screen so I can easily output different variables and watch their values as I play. Very helpful for testing. Even better, the test text display is a part of a defined #test mode in code so I can display them or not display them simply by commenting out a single line.

The ability to display a few variables on the screen has helped me narrow down a couple of bugs and I feel confidant that I'm very close to resolving the stretching issue with the splash and title screens as well as fixing the sub controls which are still a little off.

The bad news is, with the holidays coming up the need for cash may mean that "Deep Blue" gets sidelined for a bit so I can work on some commissioned illustrations.

All-in-all, I was only able to put about 10 hours of work in last week, which is a little less than I'd hoped for.

Initial Treatment

2008-11-22T00:07:00.000-06:00

I took a day off from work and hoped to do a little catch up from the hours I wasn't able to work earlier this week but the majority of the day was taken up with Thanksgiving school activities for the kids and a car breakdown in the driveway.

The good news is, the car seems to be running ok now (knock on wood). But I'm not sure if it was foreshadowing of things to come.

I did manage to get the initial treatment for Deep Blue written. It's a 3 or 4 page document giving a high level view of the game. It's by no means a game design doc or spec doc, but it still helped to flesh out some of the basic concepts around the game.

Still a little behind where I'd like to be for this week but hopefully I'll be able to make some extra ground this weekend.

The new NXE Launches

2008-11-20T20:53:00.000-06:00

Xbox launched it's "New Xbox Experience" yesterday, and I have to admit it's a pretty nice update, even if it lacks in originality. It's definitely the largest upgrade to date for the 360. It seems to be some sort of mashup of Apple meets Sony meets Nintendo.

The new avatar system is nice even if it seems to walk the middle ground between the Wii's kiddie Mii's and the PS3's more realistic Home avatars. The selections are pretty thin at the moment (a common theme in the XNE at the moment), but it's a nice start. We'll see how long it takes for the microtransactions to pop up to buy new clothing and accessories for your avatars.

I tested out the Netflix integration and although I found it a little odd that you do your movie browsing on the Netflix site instead of the 360 I must admit the quality and convenience of the whole system was nice. The biggest drawback at the moment is the very sparse list of good titles available.

Of course the one new feature I was most interested in seeing launch was the XNA community games. I was thrilled to see that it wasn't buried two or three levels deep in some dark corner of the dashboard. I was a little disappointed to find only two games available. After Microsoft just finished up their "Dream it, Build it, Play it" competition you'd think they would have at least a dozen or so games available. Then again, I'm big on the "quality over quantity" theory. Hopefully we'll see more game launch in the near future.

This Week's Mission

2008-11-18T23:57:00.000-06:00

I know this probably should have gone up yesterday but I wanted set a few goals to get done by the end of the week, some bigger than others.

Last week I got a good deal of nervousness out of the way by getting a better start on the programming than I had originally anticipated. Honestly, and I risk cursing the whole thing now in saying this, but the programming side really hasn't appeared that bad. This week is heavier on the design end of things.

I'm shooting, no pun entended, to have the game backstory ironed out by Sunday night. Along with, vehicle designs for the player sub, at least one enemy, and any initial pickups designed. I'm also trying to get a game abstract put together for the base game mechanics and at least a roadmap to expanding things out once the foundation is laid.

All that makes for a pretty busy week given that I totally missed last night. But for the big "Bonus Points" I'd be thrilled to solve the mystery of the self moving player sub that refused to sit still at startup. A small victory would be solving the scaling issues with the screen backgrounds and getting some enemies swimming across the screen, even if they're not effected by anything.

Hmmmm....membership fees

2008-11-18T00:18:00.000-06:00

So today I get hit with a reminder that I think XNA, as a program is great, but membership fees for XNA is a bit...well...odd. I recently read that Activision...uh make that Activision/Blizzard or Blizzard/Activision depending on whos really paying the bills, but anyhow THEY recently announced that they may actually try a subscription model with Guitar Hero World Tour's Studio content.

Let's get this straight, Activision is going to charge me a fee...for the privilege of downloading game content that they didn't even create. I figure that makes about as much sense as YouTube charging me to watch videos.

All this of course comes about because my XNA premium membership expired today. Let me restate that I really like XNA as a source of community generated games, but it still, in the back of my mind strikes me a little...odd...that I'm paying a fee for the privilege of creating games. Yes, the tools are "free", or maybe their not depending on how you look at it.

In any case, no more builds to the 360 until Thursday when I'll set up the next 4 months.

In other news I finished Halflife 2 on the 360 this evening. This was my third time through the game, but the first time on the 360.

Status - Week 1

2008-11-17T01:15:00.000-06:00

Here's a short 40 second video showing the game as it stands at the end of one week of development. It's about 10-12 hours of actual developement time with this being a hobby and all...hey, a guy's gotta have a life.

This week was really all about getting started. Deciding on a game genre, concept and what the learning objectives are for the project. I'm approaching the project with an iterative design process and we'll see how that goes. Basically what that means is getting things rolling as quickly as possible and building up from those basics.

I've got a basic game concept, created some rough 2d assets, imported them into XNA game studio, set down some fundamental code for game flow, player movement and shooting, and I've even successfully sent an initial test build to my Xbox 360.

All-in-all, not a bad week.

Ship Thumbnails and Profiles

2008-11-17T00:08:00.000-06:00

I thought I was going to get a little further today, but Rock Band 2 and Spore had other ideas. In any case, here's a couple pages of very quick ship sketches.

I focused primarily the ship profile since that's what the player will be seeing 99% of the time. I was also tossing around name ideas in my head and I think I'm going to go with "Deep Blue" for now. I know...it was the name of that chess playing computer but it sounded unspecific enough for a game that right now doesn't have many specifics about it. I like it because of it's unlimited possibilities (other than the fact that it sounds like it deals with something deep underwater).

With that in mind, I put together a few type studies for both title treatments and UI type. That helped narrow down the direction a little more. When I began I basically had three possible approaches to the look and feel of the game.
1) Targeted at Kids, fun, "happy bubble underwater game"
2) Arrggggg, "There be pirates!" approach
3) Sleek High Tech, "Seaquest 2010"

Based on the direction most of the ship profile sketches had taken and the fact that at its heart, it's an arcade shooter game, I veered away from the "Happy bubble" and "Pirate" games and more toward the "Seaquest 2010" look.

The good news is, this early on if something pops up and screams..."this just isn't going the right direction", it's not going to be too terribly tough to change.

First 360 Build

2008-11-16T09:51:00.000-06:00

I sent a quick build to the 360, just to make sure everything was behaving as it should. From a programming checkpoint, everything checked out. However it's clear the 'safe area' on various TVs is going to have to be dealt with.

The take away is that I'll most likely be placing all the game user interface (UI) elements in relation to the borders of the screen instead of at hardcoded x,y coords. Just a little something to keep in mind during UI design.

Back To Design Mode

2008-11-15T21:26:00.000-06:00

Well, I now have our player sub firing shots forward...there's a little tweeking to do since the shot spawns at 0,0 on the sub, which is around the area of the tip of the rear tail. But it's a first step. Again, the method I'm using with the overall game design is to get the basic game working and build with experimentation. It's sort of like painting, start with the a rough sketch or basic underpainting and work up the details as you progress while trying not to get to focused on any one point along the way.

Now I turn back to more familiar territory, for me at least, and that's the design of the ships, pickups and UI. I've got some initial thumbnail sketches of vehicles and I like the way a couple of them are shaping up.

First Screens and Flow

2008-11-15T18:10:00.000-06:00

I put together some initial screens for the logo splash screen (no pun entended), title screen and game screen. While they're only for position only (FPO) they served their purpose of confirming loading in graphics, some including alpha channels, and having a visible flow from the splash screen, to the title screen (after hitting "A"), and entering the game (skipping the menu interface).

Here's a first look. It's not terribly exciting, but it's a start.

And I do have very crude control over the sub strictly for testing user input.

You can see some scaling problems I'm having with variable aspect ratios of standard and HD TVs.

Game Summary - "Phase 1"

2008-11-12T23:41:00.000-06:00

So for phase 1 of the game here is our checklist of objectives.
1. Basic game flow which includes: logo screen, splash/title screen, how to play pop-up window, game screen, game over screen.
2. Game play will be a left-to-right, ship side scroller. Player movement will be limited to predetermined area of the screen. There will be only one 'layer' of scrolling background.
3. Player has a single fire weapon which fires in the direction the ship is facing.
4. There will be one type of enemy and it will spawn at random heights on the right side of the screen and move to the left.
5. Play time will be limited by an 'air supply' that the player's ship has. The game is over when the player runs out of air.
6. The only player pickup will be tanks of air that spawn at random intervals and move along with the background.

So, not the most original of games, but it's a start and one that can be expanded on once the basics are laid out.

Quick Start

2008-11-11T23:50:00.000-06:00

In an effort to get things rolling as quickly as possible I put together rough concept art for the background and ship. It would be my version of "programmer art". The idea here is to get something playable as soon as possible so I can really start toying around with possibilities and testing what works and what doesn't work in terms of game play.

So I've got a nice simple underwater background and a single seat submarine for the player. I create a new Windows project in Visual Studio C# 2005 and begin to import my basic assets. I'm using XNA Studio 2.0 even though version 3.0 was recently released simply because it's already proven and established.

It only took an hour or so to get the background and the ship drawn on the screen with a basic control scheme to move the sub around. The rest of the time I spent concepting the story and actual vehicle designs.

Torque X

2008-11-11T19:09:00.000-06:00

I just ran across the fact that Garage Games has partnered with Microsoft and XNA to provide it's Torque X engine to all XNA Premium members. I jumped on the opportunity and downloaded the engine.

However, for the time being, I'm going to continue with development of the underwater game as planned and most likely hit up the Torque engine for a later project.

Initial Ideas

2008-11-11T00:12:00.000-06:00

Since I'm not looking to dive straight into the deep end of the pool, the main thing I'm trying to focus on is developing a game concept that can be built upon in little pieces.

After a couple of hours of brainstorming, (it's a 45 minute commute with no traffic to and from work), I've decided my first XNA game will be a 2D side-scrolling arcade style game. I'm also conceding that this first game will very much be a 'throw away' game. It should be fun enough to play with the kids here at the house, but I have no hopes of this ever making it past the XNA peer review.

Even being a 'throw away' there are a number of core things I'm looking to accomplish here.

1) Get a hands on basic understanding of C# and XNA as a tool set
2) Spot any inconsistencies between the Windows development and the 360 development (and learn how to deal with them)
3) Start to set up a basic pipeline for production (for 2d games)
4) Establish some basic game mechanics (game state management, player movement, scoring etc)
5) Build the game in a modular approach so that new elements/mechanics can be built onto the basic game as we go

As far as the theme/concept goes, it can be just about anything. I've always liked the ocean and aquatic life so I'll develop some story or concept that is ocean driven. It could be "Atlantis" inspired or "40,000 Leagues Under the Sea" or "Nemo" themed...there's so many possibilities somethings bound to pop up.

My immediate XNA background going into this consists of a handful of basic trial publishes to the 360, reading "XNA Game Studio 2.0", and so far approximately a quarter of the way through the "Visual C# 2005 - Step by Step" book. I also worked through the very nice 2d game video tutorial on the XNA site for the "Cannon Game". That was a big help, if you're a beginner and you haven't check it out yet I highly recommend it.

A Beginning

2008-11-09T20:32:00.000-06:00

Things have to start somewhere and this seems like a good place. I'm creating this blog to track my progress developing XNA games for the Xbox 360.

A little background on myself for those just dropping by. I began programming when I was eight, in basic on my old TRS-80 Model I. I spent many hours and sleepovers typing hundreds of lines of code from books and magazines just to get to play tic-tac-toe or mine sweeper. I was inspired by games like Wizardry, Bard's Tale, and a slew of Scott Adams adventure games (the ones with the verb/noun commands) and I was determined to become a game programmer. However, that quest ended sometime around high school when I was told you had to be really good in math to be a programmer. Even though I'd gotten straight "A's" in all my programming classes (up through Pascal), I was having serious trouble with basic algebra. Anyhow, one thing led to another and I abandoned my programming quest for an artistic one.

Fast forward 30 or so years and somehow I've managed to end up as "Senior Game Designer" for a casual/advergaming company called Blockdot. I put the title in quotes because that's not exactly an accurate description of my job. It's much more on the art side of things than the game design side.

In any case, although I never professionally took the developer route, I never completely gave dropped the ball on it either. I've managed to piece together games with Director, Flash, 3d GameStudio and a few other tools. And when I heard Microsoft was going to allow development of games for the Xbox 360 I knew I'd found my next new toy.

So here we are. I've ran a few proof of concept project with XNA Studio 2.0 but so far nothing has been approached as a complete project. It's all been more of a "where do I start" type of experiments.

So, let's get started.

Development of "Deep Blue"

Hello 2011…and February

Future of XNA…

Sprite Batch Optimizations

New Enemy Tests

Video Intro Test - *Check*

Marine Superpower Poll

Interpolation Success!

Much Calmer Now

Full Circle

Upgrade Fail

Studio Express Update Day

Timer Trouble

Tweening...stuff

New Animation System in Place

Let the Music begin.

Recent Progress

Deeper Blue

Some Days

Multiple Updates

Weapons Upgrade

Inspired By vs. Educational

Happy 2010!

Over a Year

Back Up And Running

Visual Studio Malware???

Version Problem Solved...sort of

Version Problems...

My First Game Component

Unity 3d is now FREE

Signed In!

To Multiplay, Or Not To Multiplay

October Video Update

Connor the Game Designer

He's ALIVE!!!!

Deep Blue 2.0

Making Progress

Back at it, with a new strategy

Sucker Shark

The new book has arrived

Good 'n Broke

Purchased a new XNA book

Stone Squid Animation

Christmas Lights...

Another major restructuring

Slugging through

A Few Underwater Facts

In-Game Screenshots

Video Update

Successful Music test...sort of

Musical Score

A Few Days Focus on Deep Blue

Enemy Mine...

Enemy Ship 2

Armored Enemy Ship

Enemy Ship Design in ZBrush

Co-Op has begun

Huge Cleanup and Big XNA Announcement

Video Update

Variable Screen Resolution...

Successful Sound on the 360

And then there was sound

Kodu Fun

All Hail 4-Day Weekends

Still poking along at about 1/4 speed

Inspired By

Reading....analyzing....reading....analyzing

Conversion to XNA 3.0

Deep Blue on the 360

Fun with particles

Back at it

3 Week Video - a Little Late

Happy New Year All!

The Holidays Caught Up

Can't Seem to Stop

"Manta" concept art

Holiday Break

Week 2 Summary

Initial Treatment

The new NXE Launches

Video Intro Test - Check