GWB Game Design Challenge
Now that my XBox is in my grubby little hands, I just wanted to take the time to say thanks for putting together such a fun contest. It was a lot of fun making Bob the Fish and I really enjoyed watching the progress and development arcs of all the other competitors. So congratulations to everyone who took the time to compete. I hope we get to have another go at a contest with each other in the future, the banter and the support was just simply wonderful and the contest a whole heckuva lot of fun! ......
Similar to Scott, I felt pretty aimless after finishing off my game. I've been pouring so much work into the game contest in the evenings and the weekends that not having anything to work on felt pretty odd. So, to take advantage of my current "work horse" mentality, I'm going to attempt to provide some Managed DirectX tutorials for those interested in developing 2D games. These tutorials will be created using Visual Basic.NET (the express version) which is a language seriously lacking in Managed ......
The GWB Contest has ended and the contestants have posted their code to the server. Time to raise our glasses in the air and congratulate each other on a job well done. Just completing and having something to show people to say "I made that!" is a pretty awesome achievement. I'm really excited too because each contestant tackled a different gametype and focused on different types of technologies. Should be plenty of nice examples to improve my own coding skills and have those "oh THAT's how I should ......
Tonight was slightly stressful. I always get stressed on release days (or nights, whatever). It just seems that no matter how small the release, things always pop up. Well, even with the small things that kept appearing, I still got it submitted and I'm glad. I'm tired. For those of you anxious to take a peak at it before Jeff makes it available. You can grab the project source here or you can just grab the game here (I think it will work, I know the source code will, just not sure about my standalone ......
Tonight was just one of those nights. I just couldn't seem to wrap my mind around any of the little game glitches I was trying to iron out tonight. It seemed like the simplest things were just causing me major amounts of headaches. One of the issues I was trying to figure out tonight was how to get Bob's kids to follow him properly in the "Follow the Leader" level. I had it working, but the fish were kind of jumpy and Bob was always in constant collision with the first two of his children so I was ......
Tonight I spent some more time cleaning up my code and then I spent a little more time messing up the code by adding in some artificial intelligence. The Jellyfish on the Feeding Frenzy level (the Pac-Man clone) just weren't difficult enough so I made them chase Bob a bit more "intelligently". They are also very adept now at avoiding him when they are scared. The A.I. could still use some improvements, but it's a much more challenging level then it was when I started tonight. I really want to take ......
I've got the last of the game errors I was planning on addressing fixed, so now I'm just play testing and tweaking the game difficulty a bit. I also spent some time tonight cleaning up the project and removing those classes that I no longer use and I cleaned up some of my unused graphic files from the project directory. The only remaining floating (and concerning) issue is a weird texture issue I've experienced when testing the game on another computer, but I'm not sure what to do about it. All my ......
Tonight I finally added in all of the story transitions for the Story Mode. That I believe is the final "new" development piece for Bob the Fish. There are just a couple of bugs I plan on fixing and then that's all she wrote. I'll be handing it in and breathing a sigh of relief that I made it to the end. After I added the story elements in and went through the levels (in a shortcut fashion, lowering the requirements for each...oh that reminds me I should probably set those back..), it just felt really ......
Just came off a weekend filled with a new 6 year olds Star Wars themed birthday activities. And for some crazy reason, the Northwest decided it didn't feel like being a moderate climate and temperature shut up into the upper 90s. We're you're not used to that it can be a bit much. Not much time left in the contest, but I'm feeling ok with where I'm at. There's of course more I could do for each level (there's always more), but I'm being good and just focusing on final tweaks and cleaning up my code. ......
I'm not going to have time to add sound, but it looks like I might just be able to get all my loose ends wrapped up and having a fairly functional working game to submit before next Friday (the 30th). I'm just now putting the finishing touches on the final boss battle and then it's just going through each of the game types and cleaning up those little things that I told myself that I would look at later. This whole contest has just been such an amazing experience. To be honest, I wasn't sure I was ......
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