I don't know how much you have been on xbox live or at all but they have this place to download Indie games. (which I think you might know about) Now this is just like Xbox Arcade but pretty much anyone can make a game about anything (trust me there are some pretty retarded games) and get it submitted and people can download it like normal. It is pretty easy to do but what impressed me the most was the figure sales these kids were making. (unless they are just making them up.
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Anyways I figured this would be pretty cool as it seems to bring in pretty good money. I bet you could make amazing games too. (they have a lot of tutorials on the site also)
It probably is more convenient because you don't even need to find any sponser(s) either.
Oh maybe somehow your current project can get ported to there too. I bet it would be a success.
Full Version: Hey Max
I actually spent a lot of time working in XNA and started a couple of big projects that I never finished, also worked on a bunch of middleware and tools for doing 2D graphics which are briefly mentioned at the bottom of http://www.flecko.net/projects.html, a lot of that stuff is now unnecessary due to improvements in newer versions of XNA though.
I stopped using it because I realized it was taking me way longer to do stuff than it does in Flash (which has matured incredibly as a platform in the past few years). Of course there are many things you can do with XNA that you can't with Flash, which is what got me interested in it to begin with, but now I think that realistically all the complex stuff is out of my reach anyway, at least while this is just something I do in my spare time.
I'll see if I can find screens of my unfinished projects though, that would be fun.
I stopped using it because I realized it was taking me way longer to do stuff than it does in Flash (which has matured incredibly as a platform in the past few years). Of course there are many things you can do with XNA that you can't with Flash, which is what got me interested in it to begin with, but now I think that realistically all the complex stuff is out of my reach anyway, at least while this is just something I do in my spare time.
I'll see if I can find screens of my unfinished projects though, that would be fun.
QUOTE (Max @ Feb 22 2010, 09:02 PM) 
I'll see if I can find screens of my unfinished projects though, that would be fun.
Please do.
If you ever make an XNA game and I play it on xbox I would bust a nut.
One of the games I wanted to make was a tactics RPG. I don't get why there are no good multiplayer strategy games on the xbox except for board game adaptations.
Place some units...(the number at the bottom is a timer)
The images at the top show the order of turns and how much time is left until each character's turn. Right now it's etna's turn, so the menu on the right shows the actions she can do and how long they take. The more the character does in their turn, the longer it take until their next turn.
Etna moves...
and shoots. Not really sure why there's two cancel buttons.
I had a lot of ideas for this one but I got way ahead of myself. When I should have been prototyping I was working on infrastructure--networking, abstract game systems, all this stuff that doesn't really matter until you have some real play.
I'll see if I can get anything else working, a lot of this stuff I can't build or run and I didn't take any screens.
Place some units...(the number at the bottom is a timer)
The images at the top show the order of turns and how much time is left until each character's turn. Right now it's etna's turn, so the menu on the right shows the actions she can do and how long they take. The more the character does in their turn, the longer it take until their next turn.
Etna moves...
and shoots. Not really sure why there's two cancel buttons.
I had a lot of ideas for this one but I got way ahead of myself. When I should have been prototyping I was working on infrastructure--networking, abstract game systems, all this stuff that doesn't really matter until you have some real play.
I'll see if I can get anything else working, a lot of this stuff I can't build or run and I didn't take any screens.
QUOTE (Max @ Feb 23 2010, 04:26 AM)
One of the games I wanted to make was a tactics RPG. I don't get why there are no good multiplayer strategy games on the xbox except for board game adaptations.
Place some units...(the number at the bottom is a timer)
The images at the top show the order of turns and how much time is left until each character's turn. Right now it's etna's turn, so the menu on the right shows the actions she can do and how long they take. The more the character does in their turn, the longer it take until their next turn.
Etna moves...
and shoots. Not really sure why there's two cancel buttons.
I had a lot of ideas for this one but I got way ahead of myself. When I should have been prototyping I was working on infrastructure--networking, abstract game systems, all this stuff that doesn't really matter until you have some real play.
I'll see if I can get anything else working, a lot of this stuff I can't build or run and I didn't take any screens.
Place some units...(the number at the bottom is a timer)
The images at the top show the order of turns and how much time is left until each character's turn. Right now it's etna's turn, so the menu on the right shows the actions she can do and how long they take. The more the character does in their turn, the longer it take until their next turn.
Etna moves...
and shoots. Not really sure why there's two cancel buttons.
I had a lot of ideas for this one but I got way ahead of myself. When I should have been prototyping I was working on infrastructure--networking, abstract game systems, all this stuff that doesn't really matter until you have some real play.
I'll see if I can get anything else working, a lot of this stuff I can't build or run and I didn't take any screens.
Well first off I like the whole idea you have for the turn based strategy that doesn't just involve having a set amount of turns available and then the next round is the same. It looks like it makes each turn have even more meaning.
Its like you do too much one turn, and then the strategy fails well now you have to wait even longer and your enemy knows what to retaliate with now because you messed up so you become a sitting duck. Is that kinda how it would work because that sounds more original then a lot of crap out there.
Also did you draw those characters because that is pretty damn good. (or were they just samples in the files for use?)
But yeah I have the same problem where I dream up these grandiose projects and I don't take the necessary steps or I just do things out of order or not plan enough to begin with and then it falls apart... I lose moral, and then I stop working on it altogether.
Would love to see what else you worked on btw.
The characters are from disgaea, which is a really brilliant game. Just stand-in artwork, I can't draw. The idea of turn queue is not mine, it was used for example in the final fantasy tactics games and metal gear acid.
disgaea IS brilliant. I need to get my ps2 back.
disgaea disgaea disgaea disgaea
i was looking through the screenshots and i'm all EEEEE I RECOGNIZE ALL THOSE NAMES and then i get to the bottom and i discover that everyone else does, too :(
(skwisgaar is from metalocalypse, ramza is from FFT)
i was looking through the screenshots and i'm all EEEEE I RECOGNIZE ALL THOSE NAMES and then i get to the bottom and i discover that everyone else does, too :(
(skwisgaar is from metalocalypse, ramza is from FFT)
I found more screenshots. Still can't build anything. One thing that is definitely bad about XNA, porting projects from one version to another always sucks way worse than it should.
Anyway, this was going to be a side-scrolling shooter with lots of different vehicles that you could roll around in. I think I spent most of the time on this one just doing really weird stuff, like the terrain, physics, and animation were all pretty non-standard and programmed from scratch. This was from a time when I enjoyed programming in its own right and didn't think very hard about how games work.
Like helicopters and jeeps.
Boats and soldiers. There was actually a lot more artwork done for this (by krinkels in fact). Animation for all the characters and units, buildings, props.
Some physics.
Each team had bases where you could buy vehicles, it did this cool thing when you entered a base where the game didn't quite pause but just went in extremely slow motion. Awesome.
Some kind of totally unnecessary particle effect editor. There was a skeletal character animation tool too with keyframes and stuff.
Terrain editor. This is the pinnacle of weirdness in my design. The terrain was defined as a sequence of polynomials, so there would be a poly for the first 100 horizontal pixels, then another for the next 100, etc. I had a shader that could then render the terrain smoothly at any magnification, just like how vector graphics still look smooth when you blow them up. Having the polynomial also allowed me to calculate the normal at any point for physics by taking the derivative, and I also reparameterized it with respect to arc length in order to figure out where a soldier walking either "left" or "right" should be on the curve each frame. (I was taking calculus when I was working on this.) I'm sort of proud of the mathematical cleverness but really it was a dumb idea, when you make games you should just do everything in the most simple, proven, off-the-shelf way possible unless there's a specific reason to do otherwise that is based on a well thought out game mechanism and will directly result in fun.
Anyway, this was going to be a side-scrolling shooter with lots of different vehicles that you could roll around in. I think I spent most of the time on this one just doing really weird stuff, like the terrain, physics, and animation were all pretty non-standard and programmed from scratch. This was from a time when I enjoyed programming in its own right and didn't think very hard about how games work.
Like helicopters and jeeps.
Boats and soldiers. There was actually a lot more artwork done for this (by krinkels in fact). Animation for all the characters and units, buildings, props.
Some physics.
Each team had bases where you could buy vehicles, it did this cool thing when you entered a base where the game didn't quite pause but just went in extremely slow motion. Awesome.
Some kind of totally unnecessary particle effect editor. There was a skeletal character animation tool too with keyframes and stuff.
Terrain editor. This is the pinnacle of weirdness in my design. The terrain was defined as a sequence of polynomials, so there would be a poly for the first 100 horizontal pixels, then another for the next 100, etc. I had a shader that could then render the terrain smoothly at any magnification, just like how vector graphics still look smooth when you blow them up. Having the polynomial also allowed me to calculate the normal at any point for physics by taking the derivative, and I also reparameterized it with respect to arc length in order to figure out where a soldier walking either "left" or "right" should be on the curve each frame. (I was taking calculus when I was working on this.) I'm sort of proud of the mathematical cleverness but really it was a dumb idea, when you make games you should just do everything in the most simple, proven, off-the-shelf way possible unless there's a specific reason to do otherwise that is based on a well thought out game mechanism and will directly result in fun.
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