You know, that's a good topic to discuss. How is everyone creating their art?
For me, I have been doing retro-style art and so I can manage with just a mouse and my favorite really-old paint program (Paint Shop Pro, some old version). I use it for sprites/tiles/everything. For animation of tiles and sprites, I use the animation program it comes with for the purpose of previewing my animations.
However, there are freeware programs out there available for both tile work and sprite animation. Pretty good programs depending on your project. I tried to find a decent tiling one that would work with the resolution I'm working at but couldn't find a decent one.
I have seen in the past some programs that looked really useful for animating sprites. Man I will probably need a program like that for the next project.
As far as big stuff like cover art, I've been doing the sketch-by-hand, scan to PC, then retrace and color and detail everything digitally method. It's not a bad method but for stuff like this I think having a tablet would produce much more natural looking results in terms of lines and coloring. If making games like this continues to be successful I will probably get a tablet at some point. Which would probably help with animating higher resolution sprites as well if we do a game like that.
For tiles and sprites I just used good old MSpaint as it's so simple and quick to use, supports PNG files and has a good line-tool and colour mixer. To check the animation of the sprites I used a free program called pencil, and for the backgrounds (which needed shading and blurring and certain colour altering effects) I used Paint.net, which is also freeware.
For straight-forward pixel art though, it's MSpaint for the win!
Wow, you guys get great mileage out of free stuff. Very encouraging to know!
As for me, this is my first time really working in 2D. I started with modding and level design in high school, where the emphasis was in 3D. I know my way around 3D Studio Max and various other programs pretty well (and Around The World was mostly in 3D), but have only now been getting decent at Photoshop. Photoshop was my choice after I found GIMP to be horribly unwieldy, but my Photoshop license is crazy old, so I should check out Paint.net.
GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
edited August 2010
I swear by Paint.NET. Firstly, because it's an awesome free program. Secondly, because it's written in C# and the source code is available, so if I ever wanted to modify it, I could.
Of course, the only thing I'm using it for right now is to draw my crappy UI elements. I need an artist bad, hehe.
I use paint.net for everything. I downloaded a really useful (albeit a tad buggy) plugin that lets you preview animations. I've also got an app on my iPod called EDGE touch that's pretty boss for doing sprites when I'm stuck somewhere without a laptop or anything.
I swear by Paint.NET. Firstly, because it's an awesome free program. Secondly, because it's written in C# and the source code is available, so if I ever wanted to modify it, I could.
Of course, the only thing I'm using it for right now is to draw my crappy UI elements. I need an artist bad, hehe.
Yeah used a ton of paint.net here too. Get's the job done just fine. I am no pro but I really liked manipulating images with it and some of the built in filters and such can work magic.
I actually dig our some Mac programs sometimes too, but don't tell anyone. I use the Mac for music too so sometimes I just find it easier.
Secondly, because it's written in C# and the source code is available, so if I ever wanted to modify it, I could.
I thought he stopped that because it was never an open source project in the "Go forth and modify this however you want" sense as it was a "Go ahead and use this to learn from" sense. At least, I recall something on his blog about it.
But yeah, Paint.Net is awesome. Sure it's not as powerful as Photoshop or GIMP, but it's significantly cheaper than Photoshop and, unlike GIMP, has an interface that doesn't feel like it was created by a random number generator vomiting out UI code.
amnesiasoft on
0
Alfred J. Kwakis it because you were insultedwhen I insulted your hair?Registered Userregular
edited August 2010
Say, does anyone of you actually compose your own game music? I was thinking of maybe doing some simple midi pieces and searched the net for music sequencer programs, and I found and experimented around a bit with FruityLoops, but it's quite complex and requires tutorials to even understand the basics. Does anyone here have any other suggestions?
Alfred J. Kwak on
0
GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
Secondly, because it's written in C# and the source code is available, so if I ever wanted to modify it, I could.
I thought he stopped that because it was never an open source project in the "Go forth and modify this however you want" sense as it was a "Go ahead and use this to learn from" sense. At least, I recall something on his blog about it.
But yeah, Paint.Net is awesome. Sure it's not as powerful as Photoshop or GIMP, but it's significantly cheaper than Photoshop and, unlike GIMP, has an interface that doesn't feel like it was created by a random number generator vomiting out UI code.
I'm pretty sure PDN's code is still available. He doesn't have a public source control system or anything, but he releases the source as a zip.
And yah, everyone raves about GIMP, but the interface makes me want to cry. It's completley unorganized, and it's too late in the projects life cycle to change it drastically now, without doing a completely new version/overhaul.
Say, does anyone of you actually compose your own game music? I was thinking of maybe doing some simple midi pieces and searched the net for music sequencer programs, and I found and experimented around a bit with FruityLoops, but it's quite complex and requires tutorials to even understand the basics. Does anyone here have any other suggestions?
Fruity Loops aint so bad to learn. Compared to other programs it's probably one of the easier ones. I actually use Garageband (Mac) for my music just because I am most adept at it.
Fruity Loops aint so bad to learn. Compared to other programs it's probably one of the easier ones. I actually use Garageband (Mac) for my music just because I am most adept at it.
Okay, then it's time for me to lift my lazy ass and search for youtube video tutorials.
I'm using FamiTracker for my music, which is a free tool that emulates the sound channels of an NES. Gives it a nice 8-bit sound to match my 8-bit sound effects and 2-bit art (ha ha, I make joke). You'll hear an example of my compositions as soon as the friend I outsourced SOV's trailer to gets it finished.
Kupi on
My favorite musical instrument is the air-raid siren.
Slowly but surely I've been converting my games asset files from slapdash "good enough for actionscript" XML into strict nazi ContentPipeline XML.
I've done my grahpics, animations and now tile information files. I can now recreate level layouts from my original game in my new XNA game framework. I'm so stoked that I went out an purchased a gold live membership so I can get this going on my telly.
Hey guys. Here is a very, very early look at a game that myself (code) and a friend (art) are working on right now. I stress again, this is very early in development. It is the first game I have ever developed for anything other than a TI-83 so the process is going slowly as we learn the ropes:
The working title right now is "SWITCH!" and if you have ever played Yoshi for the NES, you might recognize the core gameplay mechanics. The basic idea is to take the Yoshi gameplay and add some additional complexities to it such as items/weapons, score multipliers and single player challenges/achievements.
The working title right now is "SWITCH!" and if you have ever played Yoshi for the NES, you might recognize the core gameplay mechanics. The basic idea is to take the Yoshi gameplay and add some additional complexities to it such as items/weapons, score multipliers and single player challenges/achievements.
I loved the original on the NES, you're project intrigues me.
Beware! For some reason, YouTube chose the two quality settings of 240p and 720p. /shrug I don't know why it's like that. The 240p version is untenable, so make sure to watch it in 720p.
In this video, I've added:
A (temporary) background
Frame animation (the fire uses an 8-frame anim)
Fire propagation
Blood and oil decals
Exploding oil barrels
Destroyable walls
Live wires
Spark FX
Explosion FX
I'm glad I made a really modular design, as I just keep imagining new puzzles and adding new objects very easily to accommodate them. However, I really need to sit down soon and think about Feature Lock and moving on to other aspects of the game.
I also really, really need to figure out how to have the player exfiltrate the critters that don't die horribly. An elevator? Teleport chamber? Hot air balloon? Straightforward opening door? I really gotta nail that one down, as people (including yourselves) have started asking me how you beat levels.
Also, I persist in calling this Project Squish. When do you guys think I should release the full name of CTDV? Right now, I'm thinking when I go into Alpha testing and have implemented a good deal of finalized artwork.
Btw, I'm starting to get all sorts of aggravating issues with sprite drawing (or finally notice them, at least).
Since I've got all manner of art being drawn on screen... background, solid objects, phys objects, critters, particles, etc... each object group has a different sort depth. I've created about 8 sort depths so far. And since there can be multiple objects of each sort depth drawn on screen, each instance of each object creates a sort depth modifier between 0.001f and 0.01f. When the SpriteBatch finally starts drawing (SpriteSortMode.BackToFront), it reads sort depth as the object's default SortDepth - SortDepthModifier.
And yet, critters crossing over other critters are still flickering, despite the fact that each should have a truly unique sort depth.
Well, in OpenGL that can happen if your Z depth is too big. The Z buffer has a fixed precision that it gets to spend on the whole depth between the near and far planes of your camera, so make sure your near and far planes are as close together as they can be without excluding anything. It will then be able to use the precision of your Z buffer at the range it actually matters and that should prevent Z-fighting.
Thanks! Your concern didn't apply to my case, but it got me thinking about floating point accuracy and Z-depth.
For sprite drawing, the mandatory Z-depth range is from 0f (front) to 1f (back). Since the range is compressed to 1f in length, I figured that sort depth differentials could be really small numbers without worrying about floating point errors, as you often get with 3D rendering.
Which led me to compare my sort depth differentials ingame, so that I found out that the Random for each object instance was only being used once, and was spitting out the same modifier each and every goddamn time.
Seriously? Didn't they solve that problem back in the QBasic days? "Are you sure you want to randomly seed your RNG?" "Uhh, yeah? Seeing the same number sixty times in a row is kinda boring."
Thanks! Your concern didn't apply to my case, but it got me thinking about floating point accuracy and Z-depth.
For sprite drawing, the mandatory Z-depth range is from 0f (front) to 1f (back). Since the range is compressed to 1f in length, I figured that sort depth differentials could be really small numbers without worrying about floating point errors, as you often get with 3D rendering.
Which led me to compare my sort depth differentials ingame, so that I found out that the Random for each object instance was only being used once, and was spitting out the same modifier each and every goddamn time.
Seriously? Didn't they solve that problem back in the QBasic days? "Are you sure you want to randomly seed your RNG?" "Uhh, yeah? Seeing the same number sixty times in a row is kinda boring."
Did you create a new Random object instance for each object?
Without looking at the .NET docs I would assume a new Random Object would be seeded with system time. If creating all the Random classes happen within the same millisecond then they are all going to get the same seed.
Thanks! Your concern didn't apply to my case, but it got me thinking about floating point accuracy and Z-depth.
For sprite drawing, the mandatory Z-depth range is from 0f (front) to 1f (back). Since the range is compressed to 1f in length, I figured that sort depth differentials could be really small numbers without worrying about floating point errors, as you often get with 3D rendering.
Which led me to compare my sort depth differentials ingame, so that I found out that the Random for each object instance was only being used once, and was spitting out the same modifier each and every goddamn time.
Seriously? Didn't they solve that problem back in the QBasic days? "Are you sure you want to randomly seed your RNG?" "Uhh, yeah? Seeing the same number sixty times in a row is kinda boring."
Did you create a new Random object instance for each object?
Without looking at the .NET docs I would assume a new Random Object would be seeded with system time. If creating all the Random classes happen within the same millisecond then they are all going to get the same seed.
Yes, that's exactly what happened. So, forgive my bitching... Random objects do indeed automatically seed based on system time, I just spawned everything at once when my level pops into being. Blame me for bad programming! 8-)
Do you really need to be messing around with draw depth in a 2D game? I just draw everything in order from the background to the frontground (sic), and it seems to work fine.
I keep a lot of objects with different draw orders in a dynamic list due to how I formated my Level class. I was getting some pretty bad flickering with them Z-fighting each other.
Do you really need to be messing around with draw depth in a 2D game? I just draw everything in order from the background to the frontground (sic), and it seems to work fine.
But, it's certainly not for people who haven't programmed before. I'm not sure where to get you started in general, then. You might want to pick up a book on Visual C# before you even start with XNA.
I had a problem with enemies clipping through each other in 2D so what I did was make a small increment whenever I initialized their layer. Like enemy 1 would have .000001 as his layer and enemy 2 would have .000002 as his. There was some static variable on my enemy class that handled incrementing this if I remember correctly.
Well, I'm finally settled in at my new apartment halfway across the country. I've had 2 dreams about game development in a row, so I think that means I need to get back to work. I haven't figured out what I'm going to do. I'll probably spend a day or two looking over the SRPG code and see how I feel about it, if I can come up with any improvements.
One thing I've never really been able to figure out. How do people design 3d environments? I mean, I can create a heightmap and place objects, but I don't know how to create a room in 3d and then then turn it into a useable collision map.
You could use a tool to generate convex hulls for your geometry that you can use in collision tests. In your case you want to fit a 2d grid on top of your geometry. You might be able to implement that by just taking a big 3d array blocks and test each block if it intersects with the collision mesh. From that little screenshot in your sig I can see it might get pretty complicated, with variable height blocks and slanted tiles.
A better approach might be to adapt a navmesh generation tool to generate square navmeshes. There are a few free navmesh tools out there, like this one that claims to be able to generate a 'tiled navigation mesh'. I don't have any experience with those tools though, maybe someone else has.
(1) How do you go about locating performance bottlenecks in your code? There are some tools listed for profiling and optimization in this thread but the information is a few years old. Any suggestions for tools that would work with Visual Studio 2008 would be appreciated.
Have any of you run into any serious performance issues? I have been coding almost exclusively in a modular and quick-to-develop manner with little focus on optimization figuring that a 2D puzzle game wouldn't really need it that much and that I could optimize as it became necessary. I am starting to notice some issues with slowdown while testing on my PC but these slowdowns seem to completely disappear when I test on my 360. At first this seemed weird because my overclocked i5-750 is about 10x more powerful than a 360. I'll just assume it has something to do with underlying architecture and the way XNA works and other stuff I don't understand or care to understand.
(2) Those of you that had multiple team members on a game that got a few sales... how did you split up your earnings? Evenly between team members? Based on contributions? Just out of curiosity, if you guys are willing to share.
At first this seemed weird because my overclocked i5-750 is about 10x more powerful than a 360. I'll just assume it has something to do with underlying architecture and the way XNA works and other stuff I don't understand or care to understand.
.
This may seem like a dumb question, are you doing any output to the Console when running it on your PC but not on the XBox? Console output is surprisingly slow. This would have a big effect if you're doing console output in the middle of an inner loop.
At first this seemed weird because my overclocked i5-750 is about 10x more powerful than a 360. I'll just assume it has something to do with underlying architecture and the way XNA works and other stuff I don't understand or care to understand.
.
This may seem like a dumb question, are you doing any output to the Console when running it on your PC but not on the XBox? Console output is surprisingly slow. This would have a big effect if you're doing console output in the middle of an inner loop.
True that. XNA seems like it can handle 1 output to Console once every frame in a 60fps game, but any more than that and you experience some serious chugging.
At first this seemed weird because my overclocked i5-750 is about 10x more powerful than a 360. I'll just assume it has something to do with underlying architecture and the way XNA works and other stuff I don't understand or care to understand.
.
This may seem like a dumb question, are you doing any output to the Console when running it on your PC but not on the XBox? Console output is surprisingly slow. This would have a big effect if you're doing console output in the middle of an inner loop.
True that. XNA seems like it can handle 1 output to Console once every frame in a 60fps game, but any more than that and you experience some serious chugging.
Gah, wow. You guys were right. I had left some console output statements in a very high traffic spot... I haven't seen any sign of slowdown at all since I removed it. Talk about a newb mistake... thanks for reminding me.
It's only, what, four weeks late, but here it is: a teaser trailer for Shadows Over Volgadan. YouTube, in its eternal jihad against me and my game, has washed out a lot of the colors, turning some of the images into giant monochrome blobs. This is only a partial detriment but I'm still furious about it. Watch in full-screen (or make sure it's set to 480p) to mitigate some of the damage.
Sapphire has succumbed to the Dark Side, so Kupi has to find him and kick him in the face. Apparently there are also demons running amok, and Kupi must kick them in the face as well. In fact, if it's a moving object that isn't some kind of deadly projectile, it probably ought to be kicked in the face, even and especially if it hasn't got one.
There's more to it than that, but it's not important.
Jesus fuck that is a lot of projectiles!
Kupi has a twirling move that renders him invulnerable, but if used too often or too long he gets dizzy. Much of the game's challenge comes from learning how to effectively use the twirl (and, just as importantly, when not to use it).
Looks difficult.
It totally is. I have no sense of restraint when it comes to game balance. I have been routinely nerfing everything I can find, and odds are the beta test will turn up more things that need to toned down.
These are, without hyperbole, the worst graphics I have ever seen.
Yup.
Your music is terrible, too.
I'm sorry.
So when's it going to be finished?
As soon as I do the following:
Put a bassline on the end boss theme and animate the ending
Implement important features like game state and option settings saving
Implement unimportant features like the unlockable things
Redraw every single sprite so the game doesn't look like crap or fool someone into doing it for me
Find beta testers willing to pull no punches (won't be hard)
Hit the publish button for the last goddamn time
Kupi on
My favorite musical instrument is the air-raid siren.
Gah, wow. You guys were right. I had left some console output statements in a very high traffic spot... I haven't seen any sign of slowdown at all since I removed it. Talk about a newb mistake... thanks for reminding me.
Woot, I'm 2 for 2 on XNA advice. I should start a blog.
Posts
For me, I have been doing retro-style art and so I can manage with just a mouse and my favorite really-old paint program (Paint Shop Pro, some old version). I use it for sprites/tiles/everything. For animation of tiles and sprites, I use the animation program it comes with for the purpose of previewing my animations.
However, there are freeware programs out there available for both tile work and sprite animation. Pretty good programs depending on your project. I tried to find a decent tiling one that would work with the resolution I'm working at but couldn't find a decent one.
I have seen in the past some programs that looked really useful for animating sprites. Man I will probably need a program like that for the next project.
As far as big stuff like cover art, I've been doing the sketch-by-hand, scan to PC, then retrace and color and detail everything digitally method. It's not a bad method but for stuff like this I think having a tablet would produce much more natural looking results in terms of lines and coloring. If making games like this continues to be successful I will probably get a tablet at some point. Which would probably help with animating higher resolution sprites as well if we do a game like that.
Steam ID: slashx000______Twitter: @bill_at_zeboyd______ Facebook: Zeboyd Games
For straight-forward pixel art though, it's MSpaint for the win!
As for me, this is my first time really working in 2D. I started with modding and level design in high school, where the emphasis was in 3D. I know my way around 3D Studio Max and various other programs pretty well (and Around The World was mostly in 3D), but have only now been getting decent at Photoshop. Photoshop was my choice after I found GIMP to be horribly unwieldy, but my Photoshop license is crazy old, so I should check out Paint.net.
Thanks for the tips!
Of course, the only thing I'm using it for right now is to draw my crappy UI elements. I need an artist bad, hehe.
Steam: Handkor
Yeah used a ton of paint.net here too. Get's the job done just fine. I am no pro but I really liked manipulating images with it and some of the built in filters and such can work magic.
I actually dig our some Mac programs sometimes too, but don't tell anyone. I use the Mac for music too so sometimes I just find it easier.
Ophidian Wars: Opac's Journey
But yeah, Paint.Net is awesome. Sure it's not as powerful as Photoshop or GIMP, but it's significantly cheaper than Photoshop and, unlike GIMP, has an interface that doesn't feel like it was created by a random number generator vomiting out UI code.
I'm pretty sure PDN's code is still available. He doesn't have a public source control system or anything, but he releases the source as a zip.
And yah, everyone raves about GIMP, but the interface makes me want to cry. It's completley unorganized, and it's too late in the projects life cycle to change it drastically now, without doing a completely new version/overhaul.
Fruity Loops aint so bad to learn. Compared to other programs it's probably one of the easier ones. I actually use Garageband (Mac) for my music just because I am most adept at it.
Ophidian Wars: Opac's Journey
Okay, then it's time for me to lift my lazy ass and search for youtube video tutorials.
I've done my grahpics, animations and now tile information files. I can now recreate level layouts from my original game in my new XNA game framework. I'm so stoked that I went out an purchased a gold live membership so I can get this going on my telly.
I made a game, it has penguins in it. It's pay what you like on Gumroad.
Currently Ebaying Nothing at all but I might do in the future.
The working title right now is "SWITCH!" and if you have ever played Yoshi for the NES, you might recognize the core gameplay mechanics. The basic idea is to take the Yoshi gameplay and add some additional complexities to it such as items/weapons, score multipliers and single player challenges/achievements.
I loved the original on the NES, you're project intrigues me.
get your own starcraft 2 signature at sc2sig.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOUGFuIRX8w
Beware! For some reason, YouTube chose the two quality settings of 240p and 720p. /shrug I don't know why it's like that. The 240p version is untenable, so make sure to watch it in 720p.
In this video, I've added:
I'm glad I made a really modular design, as I just keep imagining new puzzles and adding new objects very easily to accommodate them. However, I really need to sit down soon and think about Feature Lock and moving on to other aspects of the game.
I also really, really need to figure out how to have the player exfiltrate the critters that don't die horribly. An elevator? Teleport chamber? Hot air balloon? Straightforward opening door? I really gotta nail that one down, as people (including yourselves) have started asking me how you beat levels.
Also, I persist in calling this Project Squish. When do you guys think I should release the full name of CTDV? Right now, I'm thinking when I go into Alpha testing and have implemented a good deal of finalized artwork.
Keep going and posting!
Btw, I'm starting to get all sorts of aggravating issues with sprite drawing (or finally notice them, at least).
Since I've got all manner of art being drawn on screen... background, solid objects, phys objects, critters, particles, etc... each object group has a different sort depth. I've created about 8 sort depths so far. And since there can be multiple objects of each sort depth drawn on screen, each instance of each object creates a sort depth modifier between 0.001f and 0.01f. When the SpriteBatch finally starts drawing (SpriteSortMode.BackToFront), it reads sort depth as the object's default SortDepth - SortDepthModifier.
And yet, critters crossing over other critters are still flickering, despite the fact that each should have a truly unique sort depth.
Anyone know what gives?
For sprite drawing, the mandatory Z-depth range is from 0f (front) to 1f (back). Since the range is compressed to 1f in length, I figured that sort depth differentials could be really small numbers without worrying about floating point errors, as you often get with 3D rendering.
Which led me to compare my sort depth differentials ingame, so that I found out that the Random for each object instance was only being used once, and was spitting out the same modifier each and every goddamn time.
Seriously? Didn't they solve that problem back in the QBasic days? "Are you sure you want to randomly seed your RNG?" "Uhh, yeah? Seeing the same number sixty times in a row is kinda boring."
Did you create a new Random object instance for each object?
Without looking at the .NET docs I would assume a new Random Object would be seeded with system time. If creating all the Random classes happen within the same millisecond then they are all going to get the same seed.
I made a game, it has penguins in it. It's pay what you like on Gumroad.
Currently Ebaying Nothing at all but I might do in the future.
Yes, that's exactly what happened. So, forgive my bitching... Random objects do indeed automatically seed based on system time, I just spawned everything at once when my level pops into being. Blame me for bad programming! 8-)
Yeah, that's how I do it as well.
Zeboyd Games Development Blog
Steam ID : rwb36, Twitter : Werezompire, Facebook : Zeboyd Games
Online tutorials are good, but I like having something to refer to off screen.
But, it's certainly not for people who haven't programmed before. I'm not sure where to get you started in general, then. You might want to pick up a book on Visual C# before you even start with XNA.
One thing I've never really been able to figure out. How do people design 3d environments? I mean, I can create a heightmap and place objects, but I don't know how to create a room in 3d and then then turn it into a useable collision map.
A better approach might be to adapt a navmesh generation tool to generate square navmeshes. There are a few free navmesh tools out there, like this one that claims to be able to generate a 'tiled navigation mesh'. I don't have any experience with those tools though, maybe someone else has.
(1) How do you go about locating performance bottlenecks in your code? There are some tools listed for profiling and optimization in this thread but the information is a few years old. Any suggestions for tools that would work with Visual Studio 2008 would be appreciated.
Have any of you run into any serious performance issues? I have been coding almost exclusively in a modular and quick-to-develop manner with little focus on optimization figuring that a 2D puzzle game wouldn't really need it that much and that I could optimize as it became necessary. I am starting to notice some issues with slowdown while testing on my PC but these slowdowns seem to completely disappear when I test on my 360. At first this seemed weird because my overclocked i5-750 is about 10x more powerful than a 360. I'll just assume it has something to do with underlying architecture and the way XNA works and other stuff I don't understand or care to understand.
(2) Those of you that had multiple team members on a game that got a few sales... how did you split up your earnings? Evenly between team members? Based on contributions? Just out of curiosity, if you guys are willing to share.
This may seem like a dumb question, are you doing any output to the Console when running it on your PC but not on the XBox? Console output is surprisingly slow. This would have a big effect if you're doing console output in the middle of an inner loop.
I made a game, it has penguins in it. It's pay what you like on Gumroad.
Currently Ebaying Nothing at all but I might do in the future.
True that. XNA seems like it can handle 1 output to Console once every frame in a 60fps game, but any more than that and you experience some serious chugging.
Gah, wow. You guys were right. I had left some console output statements in a very high traffic spot... I haven't seen any sign of slowdown at all since I removed it. Talk about a newb mistake... thanks for reminding me.
Shadows Over Volgadan Trailer
A few FAQs answered in advance:
So what is it about, anyhow?
Sapphire has succumbed to the Dark Side, so Kupi has to find him and kick him in the face. Apparently there are also demons running amok, and Kupi must kick them in the face as well. In fact, if it's a moving object that isn't some kind of deadly projectile, it probably ought to be kicked in the face, even and especially if it hasn't got one.
There's more to it than that, but it's not important.
Jesus fuck that is a lot of projectiles!
Kupi has a twirling move that renders him invulnerable, but if used too often or too long he gets dizzy. Much of the game's challenge comes from learning how to effectively use the twirl (and, just as importantly, when not to use it).
Looks difficult.
It totally is. I have no sense of restraint when it comes to game balance. I have been routinely nerfing everything I can find, and odds are the beta test will turn up more things that need to toned down.
These are, without hyperbole, the worst graphics I have ever seen.
Yup.
Your music is terrible, too.
I'm sorry.
So when's it going to be finished?
As soon as I do the following:
Woot, I'm 2 for 2 on XNA advice. I should start a blog.
I made a game, it has penguins in it. It's pay what you like on Gumroad.
Currently Ebaying Nothing at all but I might do in the future.
That looks fantastically mental: well done! Any chance of an Xbox version once the PC version is done? If not why not?