So what have I complete so far?

1. Loading tiles from a .png file (copied)
2. Loading entities from xml (copied)
3. Created the entity manager
4. Draw the PC and the monsters on the screen
5. Move the PC with the Xbox 360 controller
6. Move the monsters via their own AI.  There are two types “Aggressive” which will always follow the player trying to hurt him and Neutral.  The neutral AI runs around aimlessly, but turns aggressive it gets hit the PC. (about 50% copied, 50% rewritten)
7. Created the Monster Catalog. (copied)
8. All entities do collision detection so that they won’t step over each other.  It’s not 100% perfect and it can lead to weird gridlock issues, but it’s workable for now.  I’ll probably look at it more later.

So, next I’m going to tackle combat. This will mean that a bad guy will try to seek out the player and “collide” with it.  If that happens, the player takes damage.  Then I will implement a way for the player to defend himself by lobbing fireballs at his enemies.  This will new entities spawned and if they collide with any entity, the entity takes damage and the fireball “dies.”  I’m expecting this to at least take a few more hours.

Here’s a screenshot, you’re the red wizard.  There are around 100 entities on the screen and everything is running very smoothly:

I’ve set up the environment, I’ve got a nice black screen running at 1280×720.  Now the clock starts for real.  It seems that I will be able to borrow more than I expected from my UGH and Zune remake of UGH projects.  This is good as any time saved is useful.

I do feel like a I’m cheating a bit, but then I look at the list of things that needs to be done and I don’t feel so bad any more .

I’ll post the next update when I have something running around on the screen!

Ok, let’s break down what I need to do and the order in which I need to do it in.

• Set up the XNA environment and create a basic “Hello World” application. As I mentioned before, this will not count against my 40 hours.
• Load tiles from a .png file. This should not take very long as I’ve got code that does this already. Remember, it’s ok to reuse code in this build
• Load the entities. These are the PC and the monsters. It’s not just the graphics, but also stat information on the lot. For the monster it’s just basic information like “name”, “hit points”, “attack power” and “defense”. For the player it’s going to be all those plus his level, xp, and inventory. This will take a little bit longer, but through the magic of XML serialization it should be a snap.
• Create an entity manager that will update all the entities every tick. This includes running the monster AI (such as it is) and updating the player’s position based on input. Note: Monster AI is not created yet.
• Draw the PC. On a nice black background, draw the PC.
• Create input scheme. Create the input scheme for player. At very minimum we need to track the player’s movement with the left-stick and orientation with the right-stick. The Start button will be a way to pause the game. Though we’re making a tile-based map, the player is not confined to tile-based movement.
• Create the Enemy AI. This should be simple enough. Wander around aimlessly unless the player is within range, then move to attack.
• Engage in Combat! Allow monsters to hurt the player if they touch him. This includes ending the game if the player reaches zero hit points.
• Draw the monsters. At this point we should have a bunch of monsters moving around in the blackness of the monitor trying to move toward the player.
• Create a Monster Catalog. The monster catalog will list all the bad guys by level. It will be used my the map generator to populate the level, and possibly to track the player kills and kill by player.
• Create a Treasure Catalog. Similar to the monster catalog, this will catalog all the treasure types so that level appropriate gear can be dropped either in the dungeon or by monsters. The items come in the following flavors:
  • Instant use items: Touching them uses them instantly like a health bonus or damage bonus
  • Inventory items: Touching them put stores the item in your inventory like a health potion that can be used later
  • Spell upgrades: Each level will have a spell upgrade that increases the attack power of your spell.
  • Armor upgrades: They’ll make the player more resilient to damage.
• Create treasure entities and display them in our black void. The player should be able to pick them up.
• Create a randomly generated tile-map of the dungeon. I have such an algorithm, but it needs to be modified or completely rewritten to allow for far larger rooms and far more monsters.
• Draw the map on the screen. Self evident!
• Implement collision detection against the walls of the dungeon. We don’t want the player or the monsters to walk through walls, do we?
• Implement a viewport. This will keep the player in the center of the map and scroll it smoothly as he walks around.
• Limit visibility! Only show the parts of the map that have been discovered by the player.
• Implement a way down to the next level and up to the previous one. We’ll keep the previous levels in memory so that the player can move back up to them. The entity manager will only update entities on the same level as the player.
• Implement 20 levels and the victory condition!

There it is. It looks like a lot of work, but I think it’s manageable in 40 hours. Of course, the end result is not going to be a super-polished game, but hopefully something that will be fun to play. I may dedicate a second 40 hours to add polish and other interesting elements. Multiplayer over Xbox LIVE would be nice… but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

I’m going to post an update every time I complete one of these points, with screenshots where applicable. Of course these post do not count as toward my 40 hours.

Looking at my schedule, I think I’ll be able to start on this tomorrow. Let’s see how much I get done.

There are three project that I want to finish: the 40-Hour game, my mechanical hand project, and my LED lamp project that I have not talked about on this blog but been trying to work on for a few years now.

Anyway, this post is about the 40-Hour project, its score and the deliverables. I’m going to use these 40-Hours to make a fantasy themed real-time monster-shooter… Here’s what I’ll be doing:

• Using the XNA framework. The emphasis is to get this working on the PC. Seeing it in action on an Xbox 360 is going to be the “prize” for finishing this project.
• 2D tile-based map. The map will be smooth scrolling, the player will always be in the middle. It will be randomly generated.
• Input scheme will be an Xbox 360 controller. The left thumbstick will move the player, while the right controls where the stream of magic goes.
• Random powerups are tossed around the level.
• Each level has an exit to deeper level.
• Sound effects for the zombies and weapons as well as a few one-liners for the PC.
• Background music to kill monsters by.

Now, that is a lot of work, and I’ll break down my schedule and what I’ll be doing in the next post. Regardless, this is going to be a lot of work so I’m going to cheat a bit. I’ll be utilizing these resources:

• Graphics and sound effects I find on the web
• Various bits of code I have developed over the years. I’m not sure how much it is, or how useful it will be be, but at the very least I’ll be using the same ideas
• Not going to count the time it will take me to set up a project with XNA or figuring out how that framework goes together. I worked with it several version ago on UGH and it has changed quite a bit since then.

As a matter of fact, to the keen reader, this should sounds very much like UGH. There are some differences, though I’ll probably maintain the same look. The biggest difference is that the game is real time instead of turn based. Combat and magic is very different. In UGH, you “bumped” into an enemy to attack them. In this one, you’re a wizard shooting fireballs like nobody’s business. You probably don’t want to be “bumped” by the bad guys. The randomly generated dungeon will have to be very different to allow for the more frenetic gameplay (bigger rooms). In the end, I’m taking a lot of ideas from UGH but very little of the code.

Let’s see if this time things go a little differently.

Unlike my previous Internet capable smartphones, getting on the web with this 3G phone is almost a pleasure… And that has changed /everything!/

I thought that owning a laptop with wifi was as good as it got, but with this phone satisfies a hunger for instant knowledge gratification I didn’t know I had.

“when you get a chance, check out that video ok Youtube!” says a friend. Click, click, I’m watching the video seconds later. Photos, email, web browsing, facebook – all these things that I once did a periodically a few times a day have almost become an extension of my own being.

And why should blogging be any different? So here I am waiting at a pharmacy for my prescription to be filled, at this *analog* institution which is in sharp contrast to the this new digital tentacle of mine. “I might as well give a brain dump on my blog” I say to myself.

So hopefully I’ll end up blogging more often, though I have to wonder if the quality will decrease…

Now, unlike the movie, I don’t say yes to everything, but I said yes to a good amount of things and I can say that 2008 has probably been one of the best years of my life. Rich with new and amusing experiences.

“No” is such a powerful blanket that we hide behind. It keeps us safe at the cost of being able to enjoy life. Since the experiment was a resounding success, I see no reason not to continue it into 2009.

Happy Holidays!

Today I heard about an online, multiplayer game that Sony will be releasing for the PS3 that caught my eye: Fat Princess.  A quick blurb from the official site:

Frantic and fun, Fat Princess pits two hordes of players against each other in comic medieval battle royale. Your goal is to rescue your beloved princess from the enemy dungeon. There’s a catch though: your adversary has been stuffing her with food to fatten her up and it’s going to take most of your army working together to carry her back across the battlefield.

With up to 32 players fighting over the titular Fat Princess, this sounds like it could be a really fun game. 

Or could it?

Soon after I read about the game I was clued in by Kotaku about a minor "controversy" that surrounds this game.  As is inevitable in a world where online communication makes everyone with an opinion a syndicated columnist (like me), someone somewhere was offended by the content of the game.

I found the article on Feminist Gamers to be interesting though implying that the game objectifies women or promotes "fat-bashing" to be a bit of a stretch.  I suppose the princess is objectified as a prize to be won either with cake or with an army to bring her back to the castle… but this is hardly the "objectification" we get from game or the media in general today.  But I suppose that when all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.

It wasn’t until I read the linked post from the shakespearssister blog and I found myself compelled to dust off my blog and give my two cents.  I was astounded by the author’s amazing ability to read subtext from the extremely sparse description of the game:

—but the only thing I can’t figure out is why anyone would want to rescue a fat princess in the first place, since everyone knows that fat girls are unlovable human garbage at whom any sensible bloke would sooner hurl invective than cast a longing glance.

Nobody likes to be ridiculed for their gender, race, sexual preference, or physical attributes but to make such a statement only implies one thing: You are really trying to make yourself mad about this. In the end you’re a being as much a troll and the very people you condemn.

My absolute favorite part:

I’m positively thrilled to see such unyielding dedication to creating a new generation of fat-hating, heteronormative assholes. It’s not often I have the opportunity to congratulate a cutting-edge tech company on such splendiferous retrofuck jackholery.

I did have to look up heteronormative, and learning a new word I suppose wasn’t a total loss.  Is the game going to create a new breed of heterosexual elitists because the princess is (by virtue of title) female and the knights male? That notion collapses under the weight of it’s own absurdity.

But why am I spending any time writing about a game I will likely never own or play?  Because it’s not about the game.  It’s about bigotry.

In the spirit of full disclosure I’ll say that I’m a heterosexual, monogamous, caucasian male who is fairly in shape.  Clearly there’s a little bit of me for everybody to hate.  Before you call me a fat-hating homophobic racist I’ll say that for more than ten years, the love of my life was a latina who referred to herself as "pleasantly plump." Regardless of whether or not you believe this, one of my closest and best friends is a feminist (I’m looking at you hedgehog).

Now then, back to the ranting…

Bigotry disgusts me in all its forms save for one: Bigotry-ism. I absolutely despise bigots of all kinds.  I suppose that makes me a bigot but I don’t lose any sleep over it.

Even though the post on Feminist Gamer seemed intelligent and thought out, any sympathy for the plight of women who are tired of the media stereotyping and objectifying them quickly evaporates when one reads the comments by the author in reply to her commentators.  I appreciate that 99 out of 100 comments came from assholic trolls who revel in stirring trouble and in essence validate the author’s views, but her replies to the comments that she let through are just infantile at best.  When your best retort includes mocking the other’s grammar, know that you are losing the argument or just running out of steam.  I’m not totally unsympathetic.  Sifting through hundreds of hateful comments of questionable literacy is bound to make anyone testy.

It was amusing to read the comments on the other site though.  Nowhere is the pack mentality more evident.  To disagree one mystically gets transmogrified into a troll, a douchebag, a bigot, or worse… a man.  The highly-caloric irony here is that you come off the biggest bigot of the lot. Fire and brimstone! Damn all those who hate women, large or small.  If it’s bad to "fat-bash" (your words) why is it better to "man-bash?" (my words).

Any argument containing "White heterosexual Christian men have persecuted [insert group here] for generations" instantly boards the failboat which rams against a failberg, sinking into the failsea.  But since DiCaprio dies in the end, I suppose we can all agree it’s a win-win.

You cannot "fight" bigotry with more bigotry.  It doesn’t work that way.  Unless, of course, it’s the aforementioned bigotry-ism.

Objectification of women will always exist in any medium as well as a slew of other unpleasant -isms. The world is not here to make you comfortable or to make you feel better about yourself, only you can do that. 

Getting up in arms about Fat Princess is tantamount to a slow news day.

God, I need sleep.

Life has been crazy these last few weeks.  Work has been pretty crazy, it’s always fun to be under a tight deadline and watch your work slip because other teams you need to collaborate with have prioritized things differently (No Z, I don’t mean you guys).  I had fifteen work days to get something done, 3 of those days I was sent to a training exercise so mind-numbing  that I hear will be used to coerce detainees at Guantanamo Bay.  Two of those days, however, were spent at Las Vegas.  All I will say is that she was that way when we got there and that I regret nothing.  But where am I going to get five days back?  Why work Memorial Day weekend and the one before! Voila! Magical extra days!  Too bad I was going to use that time to work on my own projects, but hey! It’s all good.

Sometimes I’ll get into these moods where I become very hermit-like and just want to be left alone to do that which hermits do and be at peace with the world.  Of course, this is exactly when my social calendar gets booked the tightest.  Housewarming pajama party on Friday.  Paintball (at unholy o’clock), a birthday, bowling, AND a soccer game on Saturday, followed by my gaming group on Sunday night.  Of course, when I do feel social, nobody’s doing anything.  *Sigh*

Also, I think I want to kill my cat but the dumb bastard is stupid enough to accidentally foil and revert all my plans against him.

Random!

“How do I know you’re not CONTROL?”

“If I was CONTROL, you’d already be dead.”

“If you were CONTROL, you’d already be dead.”

“Neither of us is dead, so I’m obviously not from CONTROL.”

[Long pause]

“That actually makes sense!”

I love Steve Carell, I’m really looking forward to his new movie.

Thank you for the countless Friday nights I spend rolling dice and arguing whether or not backstabbing an earth golem with a pickaxe automatically does critical damage.

Thank you for the priceless memory of my friend saying in front of his highly conservative mother "I’ll murder him!" That’s alright, Mrs. Limone, we’re the good guys.

Thank you for making being a social outcast mean something again.

I guess, what I’m trying to say, Mr. Gygax, is thank you for all the memories, friendships, and good times.