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I submitted my game into Microsoft’s 2010 Dream Build Play competition today. Deadline is tomorrow March 3rd so i just made it in.
I’m finally posting an update video on my efforts with XNA.
In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to add simple 2D shadows to your 2D game. My original blog post demonstrated that you can create simple 2D Shadows that are realistic, with no additional textures, no new lines of code and no math.
At the end of the blog post, I theorized that you could extend the concept by having dynamic shadows that are repositioned based upon the sun. So I created a simple Sun Cycle to go along with my simple 2D shadows. You can download the source code with lots of comments at the bottom of this tutorial.
Tags: 2d Shadows, Simple, xna, XNA Tutorials
In this example, I’ll show you how to add 2D shadows to your game with no new lines of code, no additional textures and no math. It turns out everything you need is already contained in Spritbatch.Draw.
Tags: 2d Shadows, Simple, xna
Volcano Storm XNA game 012709 from Allan Chaney on Vimeo.
I’ve been struggling with perspective. My original intention was to mirror my work on Paladin’s Legacy and just create a Top Down game. The problem I’ve run into is, due to the current state of game graphics, even the simplest graphics don’t look good in pure Top Down. It’s very hard to convey depth in top down… much harder than I thought it would be. Back in the day, graphics were so simple, depth didn’t matter. Now it does. Some things work but most do not. For instance, my player looks like a spider running across the screen in Top Down as you can see from my first video. (Admittedly, there are only 2 frames of animation for each direction so he looks pretty choppy. But until I have a fully sculpted 3D character, there’s no point in going through the painstaking task of texture grabs for each direciton times 16 or 20 for smooth animation. I’ll wait to do that once I have a character worth animating. I’m still learning ZBrush.:-) My volcano looks acceptable but I’m unable to recreate any depth with mountain terrain in Top Down.
Tags: isometric, top down, xna, xna framework, xna game studio, ZBrush
So I finally made a decision regarding graphics applications for XNA game building. I bought ZBrush. The interface is a little non-standard but what I really liked about it when I first started the trial was that you can start with a 3D object and just start sculpting and changes occur real time on the screen. No “click render to see what you have just applied”. It also takes a very artists approach to 3D model creation. Which means…it’s not like other 3D modeling programs. (It’s actually 3D and “2.5D”). If you are starting from scratch, I strongly encourage you to watch the video tutorials at ZbrushCentral, ZClassroom. The interface is something you can’t learn through trial and error as hobbyists are prone to attempt.
Tags: Gaming, Making Trees, Trees, xna, ZBrush
I really liked this book. About half of the book will be valuable to a complete beginner. The second half delves into 3D and starts you down the path of shader development, terrain generation and a third person shooter. I found the third person shooter part to be a relief since most books deal in first person when they hit the 3D section. I have motion sickness problems with first person shooters so I will never make a first person shooter. I am therefore a little biased in that regards. I didn’t understand most of the 3D stuff. So I doubt you will either if you are at my stage in XNA development, which is to say beginner.
Tags: book, Book review, review, xna, XNA 2.0
I read some of the reviews of this book atAmazon and I was pretty disappointed by the immaturity of reviewers. But I guess that’s the way it is when anyone can post whatever they want. There was one review in particular that made the assertion that Mr. Silva was capitalizing on his winning of the Microsoft game competition where he won a publishing contract for his upcoming Xbox 360 Live Arcade game The Dish Washer: Dead Samarai, by pumping out a book. This was a really stupid and immature thing to say. That reviewer obviously has no idea how much effort is involved in writing a book or developing a publishable game. And the market for these books is so small, Mr. Silva is not going to get rich on book sales. If anything, Mr. Silva should be commended for taking the time to write this book along with his co-author, all the while, toiling away at his soon to be published game. A year later and he is still working on that game, though I understand he is one bug from certification. Publishing is immensely difficult. I know just a little bit of where he is at. When I sent my game, Paladin’s Legacy, off to Sundog Systems Inc. in 1987 I thought it was done. I spent another year getting it publishable and that was 20 years ago when code and games were much much simpler.
Tags: book, Book review, Building, James Silva, review
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