17th October 2008

That’s right, the new version of XNA Game Studio that is used to created XNA games is due to go live on October 30th 2008.  With the New Xbox Experience due out in mid November to include the Xbox Live Community Games channel, this basically means we have all we need to start publishing our projects.

What this means for me, is that come October 30th, I’ll be going through all my code to convert it to the new XNA framework.  Yay for me.

Now a quick update on my current project.  I have given the game a codename “Pengu”, which may very well be the name of the game at completion.  Background scrolling, Sprite interaction, Text and Menu systems are now in place.  I now have the engine to a point where I’m starting to develop the Level Editor.  Basically this means I’ll be creating my very first Custom Content Processor which looks very interesting indeed. 

Anyway, time to get back to work.

3rd October 2008

One day I’ll learn to be a bit more proactive in keeping this blog thing up to date.  A quick update to bring you one or two readers up to speed.  I have put To The Top on the bench for the time being while I concentrate on something a little smaller.  I’d like to have something finished before the Community Games system is promoted to production (In Australia, which could be 2020 for all we know). 

As such, I have moved my attentions to creating a small 2D platformer in the same vein as Mario, etc.. Yes it’s been done before, but not by me.  I also see this as a means to an end, with the hope of extending the 2D tile engine for another game I have in mind.

So far, I have created a simple tile engine, with a sprite->tile collisions currently working (no slopes yet).  Next I’ll be working on:

- Background scrolling (both character centric, and parallax)

- Sprite -> Sprite collision.

- Text System

- Menu System

With this done, I’ll either obtain, create or modify a tile map editor to populate the game.

Screens to follow (once I stop ripping other peoples art for filler art).