OK it's 2am and it's bloody freezing here in the code dungeon (yea, I've moved everything back downstairs because I needed access to the studio gear and high-res display) so this will be a fast update.  Spent the day working on BB and things are starting to look very game-like.  You can now choose which controller you are going to play with, 2-player games are much smoother, and I've added the music engine - endless music from a set of building blocks.  Just add more blocks for more variation.  It's only a basic engine, and I'll probably develop it more as the game progresses so that I have a reusable engine for other games.  Should've written one before really, it only took about 5 hours (and 3 of that was messing about with XACT 3.  I've also tweaked the levels so that the different blocks are introduced one at a time.  Tomorrow I'll be making some new blocks with function icons on them - not sure if they'll be entirely clear but with careful design it'll do a job for us I think.  I'll also be adding a skybox (or some other background graphics) and more tweaked levels.  The level design is the most important part of this game, and it's the first time I've made a level-orientated game in XNA.  It's all going to come down to lots of playing, lots of feedback and lots of tweaking.

No news on the progress of Space Pirates through Peer Review, but I do know that Your Doodles Are Bugged is literally going to appear on the marketplace any second now, and it's a game I strongly recommend you play.  Anywy enough from me for tonight, it's time to go up the wooden hill.

Peeee-e-e-e-e-e-r Review!  Yes, SPfT is back in peer review, waiting for the happy bunch of devs on the XNA Creators Club to review it.  Regulars will know the drill by now - I sit pressing F5 on a browser window for however long it takes for enough people to test the game until their either satisified it's bug-free or not.  How long will it take?  Who knows.  3 days?  3 weeks?  All I can say is it'll get through when it gets through.  Frustrating, but I knew the job was dangerous when I took it.

This is also the week when I hope to get a lot of work done on Blazin' Balls.  Couldn't get much done over the weekend because of family commitments but now the week is my own (more or less) and I want to get the sound and music engine done before Wednesday evening, and get 10 levels designed and in the game by the weekend, ready to post a build for playtesting.  I also need to get "best practice" controller handling in (so you can play on any controller), get the 2-player code running a little more lean (might need to trim off some special effects to get the requisite smoothness) and I guess I should start on peer-to-peer highscores in there too.  Never done that before so it should be an interesting little sub-project.  Realistically I think we should be able to get to peer review some time around the week of 22nd Februray, and thence have a week off for building some new radios and thinking up new game ideas.  I might revisit Carrum and add a little Avatar action to the mix - avatars is another thing I need to get "up to speed" on, because it's something you should be able to drop in to a lot of games without too much trouble.  It adds value and player interest to a lot of titles if it's done right - I might even have "mugshot" avatars in Blazin' Balls for high scores or something - we'll see. 

Anyway that's the plan for the week.  The more I can get done on Blazin' Balls the better, I'm refusing to even look at the code for SPfT until I absolutely have to (I'm sure it will pass peer review, since all the bugs reported in the previous release version have been squashed and no new ones have appeared), and I intend to have some "proper" time off once BB is released.  With spring approaching I need to get a new roof on my observatory, set up the telescopes again, and get the garden generally ready for the growing season.

One last thing - best of luck to Monty and Emma with the opening of The Walled Nursery today.  We'll come and see you very soon to buy lots and lots of perennials!

Gwaah!  Last set of changes to Space Pirates have now been made.  The tutorial soundtrack audio now pauses with the game for one thing.  For another, there's a change to how tutorials are handled.  If you have NO SAVED GAMES then you HAVE to go through the tutorial when you start a new game.  If you DO have saved games, the tutorials will still run but you can skip over the flight tutorial by pressing Y at any point.  You still have to make your first two kills though.  This build will go in to peer review on Sunday at around 1300 GMT, so at any point after that we could be back off to the marketplace.  This really is a much better version of the game than the initial release, thanks mainly to the sterling feedback we've had, so yet another bug thankyou to everyone who's contributed.  If you had an idea which didn't make it in then don't feel bad - there are only so many hours in the day and since we've lost maybe $25,000 of sales by missing out on the New Releases peroid we need to get going on Blazin' Balls in order to stay in business.  Not your problem I know, but I got cats to feed.

On the subject of Blazin' Balls, I've added shadows to the coins and ball so that there's more depth to the visuals.  I was planning to add some sound effects today and then I'm taking the WHOLE weekend off (for the first time in about a year!) to spend time with my lovely wife and daughter on Saturday and we have family visiting from the other side of the country from Sunday.  But don't worry, there'll be lots of progress next week as Space Pirates progresses and we put some more meat in to Blazin' Balls.   I will also be writing a post about our experiences with Space Pirates once we get to the MarketPlace again.  Anyway pip pip, and have a good weekend!

It's really very early doors for Blazin' Balls, but I'm making some insanely fast progress.  Today I've got a lot of work done, with the scoring system, level start countdown, coin collection and nicer heads-up coded and the blocks for the music written.  I've knocked a mixdown together in .WMA format if you want a listen.  I'm really happy with this early sound.  As I've said before I adore the Euro-synth sound a la Kraftwerk, Tangerene Dream and (early) Jean-Michel Jarre.  This trck sounds like a cross between Trans Europe Express and Magnetic Fields Part 1.  Still needs little more work but it's one hell of a start.

But on to the game it's self.  It's a short, sweet kiss-on-the-lips of a game, rather than the 25 years of marriage which Space Pirates became, both in terms of gameplay and code complexity - the main engine is about 400 lines of code.  Peanuts, and it means there's less to go wrong this time, hurrah! 

Some of you old 8-bit freaks may be looking at the screenshots and thinking "hey I recognise that!  It's TrailBlazer!" and indeed it more or less is.  I played a bit of Trailblazer on my trusty Commodore Plus/4 and 64, and I played it again about 9 months ago.  I have to say it didn't play as well as I remember it - the controls were mushy and while the visuals were amazingly smooth for such a wimpy computer, I thought the "true" 3D touch with some nice lighting and particle effects would make for a great casual game.  The basic premise of the game is very very simple.  You control a ball which moves along a causeway made of various coloured blocks.  The blocks have different effects on the ball depending on their colour.  For example green blocks give you a big speed boost while blue blocks bounce you up in the air.  You have to avoid the holes in the causeway and make it to the end of the level, collecting coins on the way.  If you make it to the end before the "par" time you get more bonus points.  You get extra lives for beating score targets, and unlock new ball models for total scores.   Anyway pictures are worth a thousand words, so here are some screenshots, freshly pulled from the dev xbox which has been moved out of the code dungeon for a couple of days in to the living room.


Here's the provisional title screen and menu.  Needless to say this will be replaced very soon with something much more fun.  Nice bit of alpha masking going on though, and yes that's the hyperspace effect from Space Pirates in the background.


You get a 3-second countdown at the start of each level.  So far I have 5 levels in place, but they need adjustment and the "par" time tweaked to get the challenge level just right.  So this is right at the start of the level.  The white/grey blocks have no effect on your ball.

Here we go, hurtling down the road collecting coins and generally bouncing about.  Looks like I had just been boosted in to the air on a blue block to me.  The game is smooth and not so fast that it's nausiating or too disorientating - you can see what's coming, but not always do something about it.  If you fall down a hole you start the level again.  I am not a forgiving master.

The start of the second level.  Just thought I'd give a general view of the game.  The lighting and render engine is absolutely tiny teeny, and adding a bloom post-process covers a multitude of sins.  I'll be adding some background graphics (some kind of skybox I expect, using the renderer I made for Space Pirates).  It looks pretty cool when you fall through a hole because your ball explodes and the sides of the blocks around you get illuminated just nicely.

A touch more action going down here.  Cyan blocks reverse your left/right controls.  A real jolly laugh when you're going full pelt and there's an open trench in front of you.  It should take one or two runs through a level to get to know it - at least for the early levels - so getting in to the game is a breeze.

So the list of things to do on the game is already quite short - LIVE profile support and scoreboard, skybox and GXF polish, more levels and the music engine, which I'm going to write tomorrow, and main menu and gameplay instructions and maybe network games.  I recon we'll be at the point of just working on the levels (I want about 50 of them) by the middle of next week.  Lovely job!  Blazin' Balls will cost the princely sum of 80 Microsoft Points.  We'll be doing 2 or 3 more of these small games between now and the end of the summer, and then we'll think about Space Pirates 2 (which, to be honest, is never far from my mind).  It will support up to 4 local players, and I haven't decided about LIVE! game support yet.  It'll only be a matter of passing the Vector3 of the player's ball position to the local session so it shouldn't be too hard, and I've seperated out the player class so that I can just plumb the network in and turn on the taps ;)

To me, games like this were an example of really simple, inventive ideas coming to life.  There's no other game quite like it, and it's stunningly simple - very basic physics and level maps coupled with a simple render engine and scoring system.  The aim is compelling and addictive and the controls so simple that there are only about 8 lines of code for them in the main game loop.  If I can get it finished within (let's say) 3 weeks from today I'll be a very very happy man!