steamknight.com

… Alright, so years ago I tried to do a 40-Hour game project and failed miserably. Once again it was plagued by my inability to finish the game. Sad. Am I utterly incapable of finishing what I start? I like to think not. I recently started and finished a small humorous video I did on my spare time. This has invigorated me to finish some projects that I have started — and the one that has been a sore spot for a while now is the 40-Hour game.

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.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 11th, 2009 at 2:52 am and is filed under 40-Hour Game. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.