Animation Editor October 5, 2007
Posted by Jesse in : Uncategorized , 1 comment so farSo, I’m getting started on a 4E6 entry. My biggest gripe (and it’s minor) with XNA as it exists now is the difficulty in working with the standard .Net Framework to build tools. Apparently this will all be cleaned up with XNA Game Studio Express 2.0, but it’s somewhat annoying now.
However, while you can’t yet drop an XNA game window onto a .Net form, you can create one separately. So that’s what I’m doing.
That’s my dead simple animation editor. You draw boxes around each frame you want, and then set the frame’s origin. (In this case, I mean pivot point for rotation.) This information will be saved out into an xml layout that I’ve already built into the content pipeline. I’ll be building a simple sprite editor next, then follow that up with a level editor.
Four Elements October 4, 2007
Posted by Jesse in : Uncategorized , add a commentAnother six months of silence. I’m an excellent blogger, huh?
Soon after writing that last entry (the mammoth one that I just modified to prevent it from taking up the whole front page), I got a job offer to return to a company I had worked for previously. I’d regretted leaving the job almost immediately after I did, so going back was pretty much a no brainer. So once again I work for Veil Interactive, which is a branch of the Koplar Communications tree. The reason this might be of interest to anyone reading this blog is that World Events Productions is another branch. (A sibling company, I suppose.) They’re the company responsible for Voltron, and they work upstairs from me. That’s pretty neat, in my opinion. I’m not sure what the blog policy is around here, though, so I probably won’t be writing about work very often.
So, once again my game development time got swept away while I was busy worrying about life.
And while I don’t have a ton of free time now, I do want to continue working toward someday finishing something. Anything would be nice. Lucky then, that new motivation has come along. GameDev’s 6th annual Four Elements contest.
I get to pick three of the four elements, explosions, crystals, ponies, and accountants, and create a game using them. My current thought is to build a game similar to Galaga, set underwater. After destroying (explosions) the enemy seahorses (ponies) you can collect the treasures (crystals) they leave behind to purchase upgrades. Something like Titan Attacks would be amazing, but I think I’ll target something that requires quite a bit less work. 🙂
Finally, I should mention that I wrote a few entries in to my dev-journal on GameDev, about the development I’ve done recently. I’ll probably mirror them here at some point.