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Acid Rain is finally on it’s last leg of development. I submitted my game for review at the Creators Club website.
In order to view or review games in review, you have to be a premium member of the Creator’s Club which costs $90 per year. So the link above will not take you directly to my game. If you are a premium member, here is the link to Acid Rain in Review:
This is the final step needed in order to sell your game on the Xbox 360 in the Xbox Live Indie Game (XBLIG) marketplace. I actually submitted it on March 15th…and so far I have had one person review it and provide information on a bug that I have been unable to replicate.
So at this point, it’s really just a waiting game. You wait and hope some kind soul will take their volunteer time to download your game, play it and either pass or fail it. You need 3 passes to be approved and I think it’s two fails to fail. If you fail, you pull the game, make fixes and resubmit after a 7 day waiting period.
I’ve been working on my cover art for Acid Rain. Let me know what you think?
I submitted my game into Microsoft’s 2010 Dream Build Play competition today. Deadline is tomorrow March 3rd so i just made it in.
Watch it full screen at Youtube: Acid Rain
Make sure you switch the video to 720p in the lower right of the video window. It defaults to 360p which looks fuzzy.
So this was a pleasant surprise.
My first XNA tutorial that I submitted to Ziggyware.com here and of course posted on this site here was recognized by Microsoft.
I know it’s a small thing but it’s those small things that encourage us to continue forging ahead.
Here is the link to MS’s reference to my tutorial on 2D simple Shadows. What I really like is I am categorized with other “Space Brains”.
http://blogs.msdn.com/xna/archive/2009/03/10/creators-club-communiqu-21.aspx
I’m finally posting an update video on my efforts with XNA.
This is about a month and a half of work after my last video. What have I added/changed? Pretty much everything.
I completely dumped the Tile System that I was using from Nick Gravelyn’s video tutorials series. I just couldn’t stand the look of the repetitive Tiles. Perhaps it is my lack of artistic knowledge in creating seamless tiles that don’t look so repetitive but after trying to create seamless tiles that don’t look repetitive for months, I finally gave up. Once my programming knowledge increased a little I was able to start toying with other terrain generation ideas. I’m still using a bottom foundation of rocky grass tiles, however since my game structure is not constrained to tile size, there was no reason why I counldn’t branch out on the tile concept. My foundation tiles are now 510 X 510, created in ZBrush, rotated forward at 20 degrees and then screen captured as 510 X 510 Top Down tiles. I have a bunch of game Objects that litter the foundation base. All of these are created as 3D objects in ZBrush, tilted 20-45 degrees and randomly placed on my map. This includes the mountains, Rocks, Trees, downed Trees, Volcano etc. This helps break the repitition. I also created a second layer of snowy landscape Tiles that overlays the rocky grass layer. I’m still vasilating on the look of the snowy ground layer. I like the snow but it starts to make things look kind of busy. Perhaps too busy. Since it’s all randomly generated (except for the foundation rocky grass layer) I’m able to adjust the size of my map on the fly and the volume of stuff on the map.
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.
Inspired by other 2D shadow tutorials, I wanted to create a very simple method for adding shadows that I could understand, would add as little code as possible and would add no additional textures. One method I found involved simply using photoshop to make your textures black and transparent and then load those new textures into your game. But then you end up with two textures for every object, the real object and the blackened, transparent object (shadow). It occurred to me that spritebatch.draw will do exactly what this method did in photoshop. Thus you can do 2D shadows in your game without adding the shadow textures.
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.
No Shadow Shadow
I was getting tired of trying to learn ZBrush, so I went back to programming my little game engine. In the motto of why recreate the wheel, I started where I always do… at Google. I quickly found two interesting takes on 2D shadow creation. The first is recently posted source code found here from Catalin Zima, a Tech student in Romania. I also found it when it showed up as a link at Ziggyware. If you don’t have Ziggyware added to your RSS feeds, you should do that NOW!. Some of the best educational tutorials have come out of that site. They had a contest in 2008 and the articles were mindblowing. Here is the link to the winners for 2008.
Tags: 2d Shadows, Simple, xna
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