Great Balls of Fire!

Ah yes, nothing smells better than napalm in the morning...unless of course it involves raining fire and brimstone! Although, you have no idea how exhausting mass genocide of this sort is - I mean really! What we see above is of course an example of one the special weapons I've just finished coding into the game - the special weapons are nearly complete, I just need to do some research into another type of particle system for the final effect - once that is added, the Prototype itself will be complete and there will be enough game play to realistic demonstrate what the games single player mode would be like.

(Of course - I don't intend to be the final artist, after all, something tells me sphere went out of style as the primary 3D Model in games years ago :) ).

Powerups!

Sorry, no pictures yet today - the new content isn't quite ready for my large (read maybe someones cat looks at this from time to time) fan-base. I've got the powerups - whose nature I'm not going to give away right yet - integrated into the main game, I've just got to connect some of the more novel special effects I want to be associated with them up. They definitely do add the much needed extra level of depth that the game needed however - even with only a select few of them actually working the game is far more challenging and requires more thought than before. Hopefully I'll have something really cool ready to show on here in the next few days! (I'm not saying anything - but I always though huge balls of flaming hell dropping from the sky would look cool ;) ).

Highscores !

Now we have a brand spanking new Highscore system - it should be able to store and lookup the games local highscores on both Platforms :) Notice how I am so good that all the highscores are all me :) (Of course we certainly should not consider the fact that I am currently the ONLY one who can actually play the game ;) ) . I don't have much else to report today however - I've started to add a new component for handling the games power-ups. I am not going to say much more about those at the moment, however if things go as planned - they should be rockin' cool.

Prototype Video 1

Ok - so I may have to take this video off my blog eventually - but I wanted to show people a sample of what the game play looks like at the moment. My motion capture software is kinda primitive, so there is no sound and since it's Shareware there is an annoying nag line at the top of the screen :P . What I am showing here is the bare bones of the game - none of the cooler stuff has been added in yet (can you say Power Ups are Cool and different aliens would be neat? Good, so can I :) ). Anyway - assuming that anyone actually read this (cause you know I only pimp it out daily ) any feed back I can get at this early stage will be appreciated.

The rest of the day will spent hooking in the games high score system so I can finally track my own high scores and maybe a little work on the Design Document.

An Explosive Experience

Ok, so technically a cheated a bit on the explosions - I borrowed some code from Microsoft's particle sample (which I can do based on their Permissive License) and modified it to fit into my games framework, still - it's pretty cool looking. I considered writing my own particle system, but this seemed rather pointless when a "plug and play" one was availlable.

I also removed the "special" commands from the Probes - I am considering going in a new direction with this, but I haven't decided exactly how it should work. Maybe I'll say more on this in my next exciting update :)

All my other changes are just quick bug fixes and small improvement to the Zombie attack algorithm (well it's still dead simple and barely deserves the name Algorithm, but it works) - which you can't really see from the image.

Now onwards to decide what to implement in the Prototype next!

A Slow Day...

So I have nothing new to report on The Probe, I kinda slacked off today - busy letting all my peers know about my new job I start in a couple of weeks. However I have been perusing Microsofts speakers at Gamefest this year - informative stuff found here:

http://creators.xna.com/Headlines/presentations/default.aspx

Tomorrow we shall experience explosions and smarter Robots - stay tuned!

Playability!

Alright - so I now have all the required functionality to actually play the game! Now it's time to start adding special effect, the individual special powers - you know FLAVOUR! In todays game image we see me near death at the end of Wave #3 of the robots unstoppable onslaught! That little thing in the centre is the miner probe - the ultimate in technology and the very thing which I failed to protect! Of course - I DO have the highest score in the game ever - so that should count for something!

Next on the list to be implemented are the Probes special powers and to make it so the Probes can ... gasp... die! Also - soon to come should be feed back by Microsoft - here's hoping I don't get a standard rejection form letter - although with the way my luck has been ... bah! Stay tuned as the March of gamey awesomeness takes on SPARTAN levels!