next »

[cijolly]

Thanks for the comment about the game's atmosphere, I'm trying pretty hard to make the game indistinguishable from a program that actually links the players to a remote combat.
At the moment I've hit a bit of a hurdle. Balancing both puzzles and combat for a number of players which can vary by 400% is tricky. Just adding 4 times the enemies doesn't do it, because in arena shooters running away while firing into crowds is fairly important, and 4 times the number of enemies leaves very little room to run!
Puzzles are a nightmare. Being able to be in two places at once breaks most single player puzzles, and the inability to do so as a single player makes multiplayer puzzles a design challenge.

As far as getting the game to run on Vista: I'm coding it on Vista, so I would say that that's probably not the problem! To be honest, I'm not that clued up on the best way to publish .net applications. If it's not working, my ignorance is the likely root cause. I'll try and rectify the problem (both with the game and my ignorance) when I get the next version out, complete with vehicles, powerups, superweapons and, hopefully, a small campaign!

And time for what progress I have made between deliberating design decisions: Some programmer art screens of players test driving the motorbike and multitank.

[cijolly]

Postmortem

OK, just to be massively self indulgent: A brief postportem for a hobby game which didn't make it past alpha.

What went right:
1. XNA. As a hobby programmer, I found this to be a massive step up from C++ and DirectX. It did a lot of the low level stuff for me, and let me get onto making a game rather than stuffing around with graphics, sound, and control code.
2. Modularity/Expandibility. I made a big effort to stick to object oriented design principles and reusable code. As a result, it was very easy to create new weapons, enemies, powerups, etc. without having to rewrite big chunks of code. The level editor was also pretty swish.
3. 4 player split screen. Killing stuff is more fun with friends.

What went wrong.
1. Generic gameplay. You can only play so many arena shmups. An original gameplay mechanic on how you attacked enemies rather than "pick a gun and point at them" would have helped.
2. Graphics. The game was not visually very appealing. Before working on another I will need to find a collaberator or improve my artistic ability.
3. Scope. The age old hobby programmer problem, this game was too broad in scope. I couldn't get it finished in the time I had before returning to study.
4. Balancing for 1-4 players. I never solved this problem. How to handle a story which is unique to each player, can branch by player choice, and gameplay that needs to deal with a variable number of players for combat and puzzles...tricky stuff. For my next game attempt, I will increase the health/firepower of the enemies rather than the number (so as not to overcrowd the level designs) and make any puzzle solvable by one person.

And there you have it. I learnt an enourmous amount working on it, had fun building and playing it, and can't wait until I've got the free time to try again.