As you can no doubt can see, I’ve changed the look of my site yet again. I went from the nice clean black on white look to black on gray to white on black… I’m oh so dangerous and original. I’m still tweaking things so not everything is working properly but you get the idea. Some people go shopping to feel better, I change the colors of my site. It’s harmless fun until I accidentally send someone in a photosensitive epileptic seizure.
As I’ve mentioned in earlier posts, I’ve been working with Jacob on a game called UnderGround Heroes! or UGH! for short and it’s been a blast. Head over to his site for a more detailed exposition on the subject. The game isn’t finished yet and we’re both taking a bit a break (we did a lot in very little time) and I hope to have it mostly done soon. There are already other projects I want to work on. UGH! was supposed to be a quick hack of a game that I was supposed to complete in a week and it served its purpose. After that first week we had a fun, playable little game that we decided to extend in the weeks that followed. Look for a post-mortem here as soon as we both agree that the game is done. Some of the features we’ve implemented in the game so far: random dungeon and loot generation, Xbox 360 controller and keyboard input, a store (in the form of your trusty llama), inventory, minimap, text layout engine, the almighty particle effects, and the pimp-ass bad boy of fashion who swore you’ll never leave his dungeon alive, the one and only Necrofabulous. We’ll have a download available at some point, have patience.
Since Microsoft officially released the XNA Game Studio Express 1.0 two days ago and I’ve been writing a game with it and I’ve redesigned my site, I figured I’d write a few tutorials using XNA. See, I’m generous and altruistic! Ah, I can’t say that with a straight face… Ok, so the tutorials are going to be about all the parts necessary to write a quality 2D RPG title (artwork notwithstanding). Each component will be as separated from the others as possible so they can be useful for more than just a 2D RPG game. I’m going to be going over font rendering, menus, tile engines, the works. The first thing I’ll be talking about is font rendering and the first part of that is already up. This is going to be interesting.
