Zippo old chap, hello again!  Yep, I've got a new skanky build of Xenocide for you to have a gawk at.  This build features sound (hurrah!) and the first tryout for the Galaxians code.  It's not quite 100% how I want it just yet - no wave management for example - but we're making very form progress.  Tomorrow I'm aiming for new alien designs for the Galax levels, some more sounds, and better attacking inteligence.  Also PLEASE be aware that this build will STOP RUNNING on the 14th August.  I'll just be getting back from holiday in Sweden at that point but I should be able to give you something nice before I go.

You know where the build is, of course :0)  Comments welcome my loves.  Now be sure to be back in time for dinner!

Ahh hello ladies and gentlemen.  It's a bit late (4am in fact) but the second Xenocide build is now up.  There's colour in the game now, the animation is much smoother, and I've started to get the supporting code for the next sub-game (Galaxians) in place - particularly a rotation handler which keeps collision detection under control just nicely for rotated models.  I'm showcasing it on the bonus saucers in this build.  I've also tidied the code up quite dramatically, which has helped the framerate (there's an indicator of the frames drawn per second on the top-left of the screen for the moment too by the way).

So if you're of a mind to, why not grab yourself a copy and see what you think so far?  I'm hoping to have another build up soon, which will have the Galaxian-style ships swooping down on you like angry metal seagulls.  Nice!

You've seen the blog post, you've heard the download, and those of you with special glasses will know what they meant.  But for the rest of you, what the hell am I on about?  Take my hand - we're going on a little journey through the history of arcade shooters.  I think I know the way, but if we get lost then duck behind the bunker shield and grab as many powerups as you can...hold tight now!

Most of you will have heard of Space Invaders, the classic shooter and the game considered by many to mark the start of the "Golden Age" of arcade gaming.  It was immensely popular, and at a time when Pong was considered a sophisticated game it caused quite a stir.  So much so that (rumor has it) Japan almost ran out of coins thanks to pixel-hungry gamers.  To this day, there's something very satisfying about hitting the last ship in a wave or bagging the bonus saucer.  This is where Xenocide begins, with my new 2D cellular animation engine providing a funky look to the onscreen assets.  I'll upload some screenshots of Xenocide later, but for now we'll concentrate on the "source" games.


As you can see, it's something that even mobile phones could do without breaking a sweat.  Easy peasy.  The aliens move across the screen until they hit an edge, and then move down a row and reverse direction.  If any invaders reach the "ground" where your laser cannon is, then the game is over.  If you loose all your lives the game is also over.

The next shooter game which will form a part of Xenocide is Galaxians.  It took the basic formula of Space Invaders, adds some colour, and has the alien ships swooping down on the player.  Notice also the lack of shield bunkers:

Galaxians is, despite the colours and blobby background, not that much more complex than the original Space Invaders.  The aliens form up in ranks again, but after a while they swoop down toward the bottom of the screen, fly through the bottom and then back in to formation from the top of the screen.  This is pretty simple to accomplish and only needs minor additions to the logic code of the Invaders program.  So the challenge for me is to a) get the alien ships to "morph" in to the more colourful Galaxians and to add "autopilot" logic to each of them.  Not hard at all!

Now we move on to my very favorite "rank" shooter, Galaga.  I remember playing it for the first time on my Amiga and being blown away by the colours, movement and sheer playability of the game.  Again, this is a discrete evolution from the previous title.

In Galaga, the ranks are formed dynamically as the enemy ships fly in to the viewport.  This is simply an extension to the Galaxians logic.  A number of waypoints are used for each ship - start point, fly in via points, formation point, attack via points, exit screen point, return to top of screen point and then back to the formation point.  Simple dimple.  There are some other tricks too, like the boss ships capturing one of your fighters, but that's not hard to do either.  There are still 3 types of ship, as in Space Invaders, and they still have pretty "dumb" motion and behaviour.  In Galaxians and Galaga, it's all about following paths and rotating the ships while animating them and keeping the collision detection working nicely.  Nothing too taxing, but at this point we leave the "rank" shooters and move to a "player-centric" layout in the two next games - Asteroids and Revolution.

Asteroids is another one of those genre-defining, Golden Age games.  Almost everyone has heard of it even if not so many have actually played it.  It was the first vector graphics game that I saw and played and still really like the look of vector games.  Even with high-def displays, raster graphics still can't quite cut it compared to CRT vector displays:

Of course reproducing vector graphics will pose something more of a challenge, and in the context of the journey through the games I'm not convinced that going down that road is worthwhile.  I'm more of a mind to use 3D models which are procedurally generated rather than trying to stick to the Asteroids aesthetic - it's very VERY stark coming off the back of Galaga and not entirely satifying because of that.  So I'll need to settle on something more "modern", and happily the next game will help with that immensely.  It's a game called Revolution.  Now you'll struggle to find out much about Revolution because it never got to commercial release, but was featured on a cover tape on one of the old Commodore 64 magazines.  But me being me and never throwing anything away I still have that covertape, and I digitised the audio from the tape so I could use it with a 64 emulator.  Both Asteroids and Revolution are kind of similar, in that you're right in the middle of the action, rather than stuck at the bottom of the screen.  In Asteroids you can move around and rotate, but in Revolution you can only rotate.  Or rather, you rotate the universe around you:

You rotate the universe using up/down on the joystick.  Shooting aliens releases powerups, which you activate by pressing RIGHT on the stick.  The aliens are quite Galaga-esque to begin with, but soon start changing in to all sorts of weird nonsense.  I really love this game.  Again the aliens move in wave formations following paths, but it's made to look a lot more complex because of the screen space rotation.  Happily XNA makes this kind of fooling around pretty simple.  Sure, the player ship is bigger, and the weapons and powerups really start coming in to play, but I'll be adding powerups to the previous "episodes" anyway so it's all just mode and control switching, and altering the screen rendering routines to rotate everything around.  Simples!  Part of me thinks that Revolution should be a later episode, which will lead in to the "dual stick" shooter.  I'll have to think about it.

Next up are the scrolling shooters.  These come in two types - fixed axis and dual-axis.  For fixed axis, the game scrolls either horizontally or vertically.  Guess what dual-axis ones do!  There are three games which spring to mind (for me) in the fixed axis class:  Uridium, Slap 'n' Tickle and R-Type.  8-bit fans will of course have heard of R-Type so I won't bother going on about it.  Uridium is perhaps slightly less well-known and Slap 'n' Tickle is a game I doubt that many of you have heard of, let alone played.  Uridium is a great horizontal space-based scroller, in which you have to overfly and attack a series of dreadnaughts (large space ships) which are draining resources from planets.  You have to wipe out a set number of ships and land on the dreadnaught, activiating a self-distruct system which (obviously) causes the dreadnaught to blow up.  Then off you go to the next level.  As usual with these games, screenshots shown to modern eyes don't really convey how great the game looked or played at the time which is a shame, but here's a screenshot anyway!



A lovely game which uses some clever lateral thinking to overcome the hardware limitations of the 64.  It's well worth getting hold of a 64 emulator and playing this game if you're interested in the history and evolution of shooters.

Slap 'n' Tickle is a game which was created using the "Shoot Em Up Construction Kit" which was released for the 64 in the late 80s.  I had a copy of this and it was a very flexible system.  Not amazingly easy to use but you could certainly put a good game together with it.  SnT was one of the games provided with SEUCK.  It's a long, meandering journey through all manner of landscapes which, at the time, looked and felt amazing:


I used to play that game for hours and hours and hours.  I used SEUCK to modify and add to it (not always for the better it has to be said!) but the imagination and variety in the backdrops was what really made the game for me.  It's basically just a tile engine, which are of course a stock-in-trade for us XNA types.

This leaves only one other shooter genre which I want to cover (and, with a little luck, lay to rest on the service) - the Dual Stick Shooter.

The most interesting thing about dual-stick games is that really, it's just a solution to a control model problem - how can you fly in one direction and shoot in another?   What you actually do with those controls is where the real problems start.  Many have thought that just by adopting the control model you should have a hit (just like with avatars and zombies) but it's really not that simple.  You need a good reason to invoke the control model, and for many games it would have been better to just have a normal control model, like in Uridium or any of the "rank" shooters.  I haven't chosen a particular dual-stick game precisely for that reason, and if I don't come up with a good design then we may well stop at the scrolling shooter genre.  It's ALL about the design, and how that design plays.

So there we are.  An in-depth look at what I want to achieve with Xenocide.  These games defined what could be done with 32k and a single joystick with a single fire button.  People still love to play good shooters, but single-genre games struggle to make an impact these days, because gamers want more.  Seeing as how I only took 2 days to get a very playable Invaders demo working, I would feel a cheat to publish so simple a game, and I honestly want people to come with me on the journey which I took in my youth, starting with a Space Invaders game cartridge on the VIC-20.  It's a journey which I haven't finished yet - and I hope I never will - but with Xenocide it's my intention to provide a memoire of my adventures with a laser cannon.  I hope I can do these classics some justice and produce a fun, memorable and exciting testamony to the sheer joy of blowing up thousands of hostile aliens.

Don't forget - you can download the first PC build of the "Invaders" episode of Xenocide NOW!

No, it's not the forces of justice finally catching up with Davros, creator of the Daleks, but rather the start of a semi-experimental development process for our next title.  Some of you will have heard already about Xenocide, but for those that haven't, here's a quick sniff beneath the lid...

There are plenty of arcade-style shooters on the Indie Games service.  Some are very good (Decimation X, Pew Pew Pod, Leave Home to name only 3) and some stink like bad chicken after a night on the ol' booze there.  The good ones are "evolutions" of the classic shooter sub-genres.  Sometimes the evolution is subtle but very effective (Decimation X) and sometimes it's a real step out, as in Leave Home.  Even some of the twin-stick shooters are great fun.  I've been toying with the idea of a wide-ranging shooter, which takes in elements from all the classic games, from the original Space Invaders up to one of the best games of my childhood - R-Type.  And so now I've started writing it.

Xenocide is a journey through what I think are THE best arcade shoot 'em ups.  The player will go through a large number of levels, and at the link between levels, the game will evolve towards another of the classics.  So, you start with Space Indavers, and after 3 or 4 waves you find the game has gently morphed in to Galaxians.  Then to Galaga.  Then to Asteroids.  Then to Revolution.  Then to a dual-stick game.  Then to Uridium, and finally to R-Type.  Of course I'm not doing "remakes" of those games, but trying to capture the feel and gameplay elements which made them so good, so popular.

I've been working on Xenocide for 2 days and I have more or less completed the Space Invaders stage.  I've made 2 builds - one for Windows, and one for the 360.  If you're not a member of the XNA Creators Club, you won't be able to play the Xbox version, and for all our previous titles that was the end of it.  But there really is no good reason why you can't support both PCs and Xboxes with the same code.  It gives me a chance to show a wider audience what I'm up to, generate some interest, and it lets you guys get involved with making games.  Feedback is absolutely the lifeblood of any developer, so why not go out and get some?  Why not do that early and often?

With that in mind, I present to you the initial test build of Xenocide's INVADERS level.  PLEASE remember, this is SOFTWARE IN DEVELOPMENT and you INSTALL IT AT YOUR OWN RISK.  No warranty as to the safety, usability or suitability of the game, either implied or expressed, is offered.  Try it by all means, but if it trashes your windows installation, sorry baby.  I do this for a living, how do you think I feel about it?!

You can use the keyboard as shown on the front screen, or you can plug a 360 wired game controller in one of your PCs USB ports and use that.  A to fire, left stick to move.  On keys ESCAPE will quit the game at ANY point.  On the gamepad, use the BACK button to quit.  Download the ZIP file, unzip it to a nice new directory, and run SETUP.EXE to install the game.  You can uninstall using Control Panel, nice and clean and fast.  The game will run immediately when installed, and a shortcut should be placed on your startbar in a folder called Microsoft.  Or, if you're using Vista or Windows 7, just enter Xenocide in the searchbar and off you go!

So there we are.  2 days work, an almost complete Invaders game.  Not bad.  Now then, chuck me some feedback about the gameplay, the animation, the firing rate of the aliens, the bunker shields, whatever you like.  I'll do my best to respond, and I'll be posting regular updates to the build.  I may even be able to publish an auto-updating version if you're very nice and kind ;0)

On the BBXE front, we're in the final playtest and I'm waiting to see if the Global Highscores table is up and running.  Once it's tested and verified to my satisfaction, we're off to peer review and (hopefully) release!  All systems full steam ahead young man!