Dream Build Play Day 2: The beginning of a prototype

George Clingerman — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 02:30:00 GMT

Well, I have not had a lot of time to work on my entry since the first rough draft of the design document was made, but I have made some progress. Basically, I've begun putting together the initial prototype for the game just to see if the gameplay itself is any fun. This is a question I figured might be better to answer now than later. Unfortunately, we still can't answer that question because the gameplay still is not there.

What I do have is some of the game elements displaying. I have some randomly generated addition problems displaying for Player 1 and 2 and I'm accepting XBox 360 controller input for correct (and incorrect) answers. You can also move a cursor around on the screen with the thumbstick. I've also got my initial design for the Nurfs done and they are spawning at equal time intervals and moving across the screen.

I'm having a lot of fun beginning to make this game take shape. Going to be very interesting to see if I will managed to actually finish up in time to have a full functional fame for the Dream Build Play contest. I will be submitting whatever I have by that point, but it would be nice to at least have something that not everyone would laugh at.

Here is the version one of the source for Nurf Herder for you to play with. I plan on releasing each version as I go so that everyone can follow the progress of the code as I continue to work on my entry. Not sure who it will benefit, but it's the plan so I'm sticking to it.

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Dream Build Play Day 1: The Design Document

George Clingerman — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 01:28:00 GMT

Microsoft's Dream Build Play contest is in full swing. Having thrown my hat into the ring earlier, I figured now might be a good time to actually start doing some work on my entry. The competition is going to be fierce with some extremely skilled competitors, so since I calculate my chance of winning a prize to be fairly low I figure I will try and capture the hearts of the community instead. How do I hope to win your hearts? Quite simple, I plan on blogging my progress in this contest from beginning to end. I will release incremental builds of the source code and assets as I go so that everyone can get some benefit from me entering.

So in the spirit of this sharing, I present to you Day 1 of Nurf Herder. What is Nurf Herder? It's a game concept that I came up with about a year ago. It's went through several iterations (maybe someday I'll show some of the early concept ideas for it) until it finally reached it's current state. The game is a two-player competitive trivia strategy game. The goal, to get as many Nurfs as possible to the finish line. The challenge, your opponent can steal the Nurfs from you. You both protect your Nurfs and steal your opponents Nurfs by answering trivia questions. How in the heck does that work? Well, you can grab the quick and dirty design document that I typed up tonight. This is a collection of the various notes I've scribbled on paper over the past month. With the design document out of the way, the coding will begin this week.

Good luck to all competing in the Dream Build Play game development contest and I hope the community enjoys watching my feeble attempts at making a game.

Technorati Tags: XNA