Red Mawashi's Blog

I went to the Penny Arcade Expo this last weekend.  That was a lot of fun.  The XNA booth was pretty anemic, however, compared to some of the other shops that set up there.  It really surprised me that there was no DBP presence.

Also, I was surprised by the lack of basic functionality that a lot of the XNA games that were available there.  In some cases, cryptic controls and no tutorial made an otherwise beautiful game frustrating.  In other cases, a perfectly fun game was rendered unenjoyable as I had to jump through a series of menu-based hoops to get from level to level.

Finally, the guys manning the booth were busy handing out some pretty serious misinformation regarding trademark & copyright infringement issues.  It was a little unnerving to see those dudes as the face of XNA; maybe they were developers, and not marketing people?  I don’t know.

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I found out this evening that IntermediateSerializer doesn’t work on the 360, so I had to roll back to XmlSerializer.  It still works, I just don’t like it as much.  ;)

Also, I got some art over the weekend!!  Tonight, I wrapped up the code to present the story pages that I mentioned before.  All that’s left now is to figure out how the pages should transition.  I may need a StoryPageTransitionManager now, huh?

Anyway, still really enjoying the Subversion setup here @ dreamhost.  I’m making sure that each build that I check in compiles and runs, so no matter what happens, I’ll always have something available for DBP.

How forward-thinking!

Looks like a Content pipeline is going to be the easiest way to create my story screen.  I was surprised to see how similar the Content model is to simple Serialization.  Anyway, it should be as easy as creating a StoryPage class, or something similar.  Then, load them all up into a list from the XML, and iterate through them!

I am also, by the way, very pleased with the DreamHost setup.  It’s pleasant to use, easy to configure, and had everything built-in that I needed to get going.

How pleased!

I appreciate the irony of posting two days after I said I’ll try posting daily.

Yesterday, I did not get much done.  I sent an email reply to the artist, clarifying a point.  She definitely made more progress than me, yesterday.

Today, I shall strive to outpace her, however.  I have a standard workday ahead of me, with dinner plans set with some friends for 5pm.  I plan on working on the menu screen, as well as saving settings from said menu screen.  The menu screen should have a “Start Game” option, a “Difficulty” option, and an “Exit to Arcade” option.  Stretch goal for the day:  save the difficulty setting.

All of this, of course, means that I need to start slacking off IMMEDIATELY.

How exciting!

Follow-up (4:15pm):
Rough drafts of all items above have been completed.  We have a menu that now immediately follows the splash screen.  There’s no fancy background yet, because I haven’t figured out how I want the menu to look.  The “Exit to Arcade” command works, saving whatever difficulty you had set previously.

In Windows, it appears that the SignedInGamers collection is empty, so I had to do some tricks to get the filesave to work per-user like I want it to work on the 360.  I DO need to test the file save on the Xbox, to confirm that the per-user settings are retained properly.  Maybe I can test that tonight.

Difficulty is based on the built-in functionality.  And the GameScreen that’s in there now is just the default from the GameStateManagement sample.

Speaking of which – I’ve taken some code from the GameStateManagement sample, but also improved on it.  In their sample, each window seemed to be in charge of loading the next windows in the sequence.

I moved that functionality into a GameService, so that the GameScreen objects do not have to be aware of what follows them, and neither does the ScreenManager.  It’s all hard-coded now into a TransitionManager, but I think it would be pretty sweet to switch the transition elements into XML.  I’m DEFINITELY saving that for the end, though, since it’s not specifically a gameplay element.

Additionally, I’ve set up subversion, so that I can maintain my code remotely and not have to stress about anything being lost.  It should also let me share my code with the artist, as I progress.

Finally, I did a little work on the icons for the game executable.  Nothing I’m proud of, mind you, but I’m working towards an overall design that I really think I’m going to like.  Of course, the more I think about those things, the more work it means for the artist.  ;)

How exciting!