The next Ludum Dare

I make something... Mark my words!

Postings and such

Since it's been a crazy long time since we've posted anything, I believe a little update is in order.

Currently, Steve-o and I are working through the Star Defense Tutorial Series on xnaresources.com. I'm on the fifth part, and so far it has been extremely helpful. Going through this has considerably helped my understanding on what is needed to make a game - even a simple one. So, without further ado, here's a breakdown of each part.

A particular lack of images

The past few posts have been fairly wordy and have had no images, so I'm going to put some pretty pictures in this one.

Tileset Editor, a Step in the Right Direction

John and I decided to start up a set of tutorials on making a tileset editor. It's went fairly well so far, and we are grasping the ideas behind most of the mechanics fairly quickly.

The tutorials begin with a couple tutorials on making a top-down 2D tileset editor in XNA 4.0, then they switch gears to a hex tileset, then finally an isometric tileset. We have reached the end of the top-down 2D tileset tutorials and we decided to try and implement a player and movement. It only took a few attempts and we had a character on screen and we almost have it working the way we want it to.

Breaking Out Update

Just updating the blog with what we've been working on. John and I have thrown around a few ideas for various games, and we're probably looking at copying some game out there for our next learning experience. Something simple, probably along the lines of Pacman, Space Invaders, Tetris, etc.

However, we have been working on our 'Breaking Out' project that we began with the tutorial listed on the right side of the page. Where the tutorials left off, bricks did not have collision detection built into them. John and I have been working on figuring out how to make this work as it should. It's not the fact that we have trouble doing collision detection, so much as understanding how to implement it in our current situation.

Allow myself to introduce...myself

Hello! My name is John.

I've had a few years of programming experience, learning most of what I know through classes I took at Western Carolina University. My degree wasn't all about programming so I only learned one language, C#. I used it mainly for business applications - making calculators, forms, linking with databases (eventually using that in websites), etc.

Then my buddy Steven got a job in the IT office that I work in and we started coding together. He's already done a good job summarizing what we've done so far, and we're still figuring out where we'd like to go from here.

Catching up

The following is a brief summary of the work I have done on my own and work that John and I have worked on together.

First off, I worked on some Java and made a "Hello World" program, a simple calculator, and something that took user input and displayed it in a string of text.

From there, I began the Hyperion Project (a text adventure), following the 3DBuzz.com tutorials for C# and XNA. I completed the first phase of the tutorials and had a working 'game' with four rooms, movable objects, a win condition and a lose condition. Using the things set up in the tutorials, a novice like myself could technically take it where I left it and make their own game with as many rooms, items, and win/lose conditions as they wanted.