By
matt
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Posted on
June 16, 2010
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Hello faithful follower(s)!
I’ve been a bit lax in keeping up with my blag here, and that’s unfortunate because Tyler and I have been moving along pretty nicely with our first game, You Are The Castle.
So, to recap where we are…
- Tyler has really been cranking out some awesome new assets (tiles, traps, heroes, etc) as of late, and even re-imagined some of the originals he did at first. In my opinion they look amazing.
- I’ve been working on implementing more traps, setting up multi-screen levels, transitions between those levels, re-fining my codebase, implementing multiple hero types, upping the AI, etc. That’s coming along pretty well, and with a solid NINE b^_^d!! days of vacation time coming up at the start of July I should be able to move us forward code-wise in leaps and bounds.
- I put together a new video showing off the latest build, and how the game is shaping up. You can check it out over on da ‘tube here (best viewed in 720p, full screen). Some of Tyler’s new assets are in there. Oh, and subscribe to our channel while you’re there. Do it! <3
- Tyler recently met up with Whitaker Blackall – who recently made this amazing thing by the way – to talk about, well, doing music for our game! I need to sit down here soon and have a chat with him myself, but things look positive in that direction.
- I went ahead and made a sister devlog over at TIGSource, because, well… you ain’t indie if you ain’t TIG, amirite?
- We have plans to re-vamp the You Are The Castle website into more than a simple splash teaser here soon. That’s where you will be finding new screenshots, videos, announcements, art, etc as it develops.
So ya. We’ve been keeping busy! We’re very, very excited at the same time. We really think our game is both unique and fun, and we hope you all will feel the same way once you get your hands on it.
I’m outtie 5k, yo.
By
matt
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Posted on
May 30, 2010
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So, I spent most of yesterday getting rid of the generic WordPress theme I was using. Elements of SEO is a great theme, don’t get me wrong, but it rather irks me when I’m trawling blogs and see the same themes over and over. I don’t want to be that guy.
So with some CSS, PHP, and this excellent guide in hand I set to work. The hard part was picking a color scheme. I know I wanted a dark theme with liberal usage of grays and a couple of vibrant colors to accent the page. After many, many iterations a helpful hint from my girlfriend set me on the gold/purple path. What you’re looking at now is the result. I rather like it myself!
I should work on making a real page for You Are The Castle soon, but I need to do some more work on the game first.
I think I’ll get to it.
By
matt
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Posted on
May 4, 2010
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I finally broke down last night and made myself a YouTube channel. I looked around for some nice plug-ins for WordPress to host videos on-site, but couldn’t find anything that wasn’t a mess to setup or didn’t require you to subscribe to some random service. I figure if I have to subscribe to a random service to show you some videos of our games then it should at least be one backed by Google, right?
Anyway, the new channel is up, and our first video showing off the alpha workings of You Are The Castle is there.
Let us know what you think.
By
matt
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Posted on
April 20, 2010
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Download at Codeplex
Well, it’s been a busy few days.
Last Friday I was browsing the TIGSource forums when I came across an announcement by Matt Thorson. You may not know him if you don’t purview the indie scene outside of XBLIG, but he’s responsible for games like Jumper, Runman: Race Around the World, and Broken Cave Robot to name a few. Anyway, he was pimping a brand new multi-platform (based on Adobe AIR) indie game editor he released named Ogmo Editor. The editor, what the name means, and everything you’d want to know about the editor are available at the website.
Suffice it to say, I was rather ecstatic about the whole deal as I had spent the past few days before that working on the bare bones of my OWN editor project for my game-in-progress, You Are The Castle. After downloading and giving it a go, I was convinced that Matt just saved me a whole lot of time.
I spent the next 3 days consuming his XML format for both project and level files, and ultimately writing a set of content pipeline extensions and a library to handle all of the data. So, that’s where I am now. The library is done, the pipeline extensions are done, and I have a simple (yet hacky! Don’t USE the code, just look!) platformer demonstrating how to load the files, and some ways in which you can consume the resulting data.
You can find the source and binaries over at its home on Codeplex here.
I heavily encourage you to check out Matt’s editor and OgmoXNA as I think you’ll be rather pleased. I also encourage comments, suggestions, bug reports, and code improvements over at the Codeplex project. If you feel like joining in and helping me improve on and maintain it then please drop me a comment here or start a discussion over at the project.
Enjoy!
By
matt
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Posted on
April 17, 2010
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So I’m working on a side project to load in XML maps generated by Matt Thorson’s Ogmo Editor. It turns out that he uses hex values to define his ARGB colors. You know, #FFFFFFFF for white, #FF000000 for black, etc.
XNA’s default Color implementation doesn’t have anyway to read to or from hex values, and a quick search on Google didn’t turn up anything very relevant on a cursory glance. So I just whipped up a helper class couple of extension classes to read and convert ARGB or RGB hex strings (with or without the hash mark) to Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Graphics.Color values, and vice versa.
Feel free to use this wherever you see fit. Code below the jump.
Continue reading »
Posted in XNA
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Tagged color, helpers, hex, XNA
By
matt
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Posted on
April 17, 2010
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If you’re anything like me constantly having to re-add the XNA using statements each time you create a new class can be more than tiresome. To remedy this I finally decided to dive into the world of Visual Studio code snippets. The first thing I immediately learned is that I have been missing out! So many doors of increased productivity have been opened, so I’m sure that I’ll be throwing a lot of snippets up here in the future for your consumption.
Anyway, I created two snippets to automate referencing the XNA namespaces that we all use. The first one only includes the most common XNA namespaces, namely:
- Microsoft.Xna.Framework
- Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Content
- Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Graphics
- Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Input
It is available through the snippet shortcut of ‘xnausing’.
The second, longer, snippet includes ALL Microsoft.Xna.* namespaces. It is available through the snippet shortcut of ‘xnausingall’.
You can download them here.
If you’ve never used or installed code snippets before, read on for a visual guide.
Continue reading »
Posted in C#, XNA
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Tagged C#, snippets, XNA
