However, while you can’t yet drop an XNA game window onto a .Net form, you can create one separately. So that’s what I’m doing.

That’s my dead simple animation editor. You draw boxes around each frame you want, and then set the frame’s origin. (In this case, I mean pivot point for rotation.) This information will be saved out into an xml layout that I’ve already built into the content pipeline. I’ll be building a simple sprite editor next, then follow that up with a level editor.

Soon after writing that last entry (the mammoth one that I just modified to prevent it from taking up the whole front page), I got a job offer to return to a company I had worked for previously. I’d regretted leaving the job almost immediately after I did, so going back was pretty much a no brainer. So once again I work for Veil Interactive, which is a branch of the Koplar Communications tree. The reason this might be of interest to anyone reading this blog is that World Events Productions is another branch. (A sibling company, I suppose.) They’re the company responsible for Voltron, and they work upstairs from me. That’s pretty neat, in my opinion. I’m not sure what the blog policy is around here, though, so I probably won’t be writing about work very often.

So, once again my game development time got swept away while I was busy worrying about life.

And while I don’t have a ton of free time now, I do want to continue working toward someday finishing something. Anything would be nice. Lucky then, that new motivation has come along. GameDev’s 6th annual Four Elements contest.

I get to pick three of the four elements, explosions, crystals, ponies, and accountants, and create a game using them. My current thought is to build a game similar to Galaga, set underwater. After destroying (explosions) the enemy seahorses (ponies) you can collect the treasures (crystals) they leave behind to purchase upgrades. Something like Titan Attacks would be amazing, but I think I’ll target something that requires quite a bit less work.

Finally, I should mention that I wrote a few entries in to my dev-journal on GameDev, about the development I’ve done recently. I’ll probably mirror them here at some point.

And I got a small taste of that feeling again a few days ago. I’ve been mulling ideas for what kind of game I could write to enter the MyDreamRPG contest and I think I’ve come up with something pretty neat. It’s a platformer with lots of rpg elements. And just like twenty years ago, I’ve gotten swept away doodling up maps, writing stories, and coming up with special powers for my imaginary heroes.

Here’s the basic story:

The player (Michael, a young boy) starts out in a very small farming village, called Littlefield. It’s a quiet, peaceful place, but strange things have started happening in the area recently. (Cattle vanishing in the night, strange shadows seen moving around in the nearby forest, etc.) When Michael ventures into a cave at the edge of town, he finds a wounded knight. The knight was wounded in battle, and is near death. He tells Michael a story about a necklace amulet that has belongs to the royal family, and has been passed down from one king to another.

He then tells Michael of the king’s caravan being ambushed. When it seemed that they might be captured, the king sent the knight off with the amulet, to prevent it from ending up in the wrong hands. He was attacked, and gravely wounded. And now the knight is dying, and the only person around is Michael. He gives him the amulet, asking him to protect it. Then he dies.

Michael puts on the necklace. Immediately he hears the voice of the knight. It turns out that the amulet is very powerful indeed. It allows a nearby spirit to stay in this world, instead of passing into the afterlife. The spirit is able to live on for a time in the amulet. This explains the king having access to knowledge from kings who have come before. Other than the knight, however, the amulet seems empty. Now that Michael is able to access the knight’s fighting ability, they agree to venture forth and see if the king still lives.

During their travels, three other spirits will move into the amulet. A wizard, a priest, and a rogue. Each will have special abilities, and the player can switch between them easily.

Some gameplay info:

My initial design will be for the XBox 360 gamepad, as I’m planning to use Torque X as the underlying engine/framework. I’ll have to find input mappings that make sense for a keyboard (and possibly mouse too), but I’m ignoring them for now. (Platformers are pretty difficult to play without a gamepad, anyway.)

Controls:
Character movement is based on the left analog stick or d-pad.
Character selection is done by holding the right shoulder trigger, which will pause the gameplay, then you pick one of the four characters by pressing up, left, right, or down, and the releasing the right trigger.
Basic actions and special abilities can be mapped to any of the buttons A, B, X, or Y. Additionally, holding the left shoulder trigger and pressing A, B, X, or Y, will give a second bank of abilities for a total of eight immediately accessible abilities.
Each character can gain a special ability that is used while in midair. (Either by jumping from the ground, or falling from a platform.) While in midair pressing jump will activate the special ability. While you can only use each special ability once during a jump, you can switch characters in midair and chain each of the four characters special jump abilities, if you’ve unlocked them.

From a menu, the player will be able to travel instantly to any city they’ve visited. A wizard spell can allow them to teleport directly to other places.

The player will have both a health bar, and an energy bar. Taking damage reduces the health bar, and when it is empty, the player dies. (Either they’ll appear at a visited city, perhaps with a penalty of some sort, or they’ll have to load a saved game.) The energy bar is used for special abilities. All the characters share the health and energy bars.

The player will also have an experience bar. When you’ve killed enemies or finished quests, you’ll gain experience points that fill the bar. When the bar is full, you’ll gain a level that you can assign to any character. (Only the ones you’ve have at that point, however.) My current thinking is that you’ll gain a special ability with every two levels in each class, though I’m not entirely sure about that yet. You’ll start off with one ability, just by having that character around. All of the special jump abilities will be the first ability gained after that.

There will be a simple stat system, with the player able to gain strength, stamina, speed, and focus. (Those map to melee damage, health points, movement and attack speed, and energy points.) All of the characters will share the same stats. The player gets points each level to customize the character however they want.

Class special abilities:

Knight
0 - Energy strike - Use energy to perform a powerful sword strike.
1 - Air Drop - Drop from above to stun nearby enemies, and break through damaged floors. (No energy cost.)
2 - Charge - Rush forward, damaging enemies.
3 - Blood Rage - Convert some health into energy. (But not at a very good exchange rate.)
4 - Bestial Roar - Intimidate (stun) all nearby enemies for a short time, or until they take damage
5 - Obliterate - Converts all energy into a very damaging strike. (Uses no energy on a missed attack.)

Priest
0 - Heal - Use energy to heal.
1 - Levitate - Float at the same elevation until releasing the jump button. (You can walk while floating.)
2 - Energy Guard - Lose energy instead of health upon taking damage.
3 - Haste - Movement and attack speed greatly increased, for a short time.
4 - Regenerate - Regenerate hit points over time for a short duration.
5 - Holy Mark - Temporary invulnerability (very high energy cost)

Wizard
0 - Blast - Low damage energy projectile
1 - Slow Fall - Fall more gracefully down, while holding the jump button.
2 - Fireball - Explosive area of effect energy projectile.
3 - Snow Blast - Damage a single target, but causes many enemies in the area to be move slowly.
4 - Teleport - Teleport immediately to any known area.
5 - Poison - High damage over time to enemies near the player. (Moderately high energy cost.)

Rogue
0 - Hide - Blend into the surrounding environment. Move slowly while hiding. Can only be done when not seen by a hostile enemy.
1 - Double jump - Can jump a second time while in midair.
2 - Disguise - Wear a disguise that will fool enemies. Uses energy until disabled.
3 - Lock pick - Can pick door and chest locks.
4 - Smoke bomb - Vanish from view, even when seen by hostile enemies. (Moderately high energy cost.)
5 - Assassinate - Massive damage dagger strike, must be hiding to use. (High energy cost.)

Points awarded for monthly status updates
Points awarded for game update blogs on GG site
Points awarded for creation of game associated website
Points awarded for GUI design
Points awarded for concept art
Points awarded for cross-site promotion and hype-building (fanbase/community)
Points awarded for adherance to design in final result
Points awarded for launch process and response to player feedback from alpha phase
Points awarded for community response to the final result
Points awarded for game documentation
Points awarded for originality
Points awarded for sound design
Points awarded for backing up smacktalk

It seems pretty interesting to me, and I intend to keep an eye on things as they develop. It looks like there’s already twelve games signed up.

Tonight I spent some more time playing around with TorqueX. It seems the bugs I was running into have already been taken care of. A GarageGames employee posted a rather simple change to a text file they overlooked, and the tile system is working again in the editor. A second similar change and I got particle effects working too. I also learned that I was only looking at a small part of the documention. It turns out there’s one file on TGBX documentation, which covers the editors, and another, much larger file on TorqueX, which is more about code. I haven’t gone too deep, but the docs seem solid, and it was enough that I was able to slap out a TorqueX version of my Pong clone pretty quickly. I can easily see how using TorqueX will save me alot of time over starting from scratch with XNA alone. There’s gonna be alot to learn, but I’m having fun so far.

Footnote:
1) - Jay’s blog is my favorite blog to read. He has all sort of wacky stories about his experience playing and developing games. I get excited every time my RSS feed client notifies me that he’s written a new post. I highly recommend going through his archives if you have some spare time. It’s good stuff.

It’s a shame things worked out quite the way they did. Right after writing the reviews for Mr. Robot and Kingdom Elemental, my number of readers shot way, way up. And then the crazy overtime at work kicked in, and I haven’t written anything since. So the readers went away.

Similarly, the amount of comment spam on the site has gone up, but it doesn’t appear to be slowing down. For the first few weeks I was deleting it manually, but it became too much for me, and I installed a Wordpress plug-in to handle it for me. It claims to have caught 580 spam comments since turning it on. Wow! I can’t even imagine how much spam big sites get. Anyway, if you try to post a comment, and it doesn’t show up, it was probably flagged as spam by the system. I got the contact form working again, so feel free to shoot me a message if that seems to be happening to you.

Unfortunately, all of my game development projects were forced to be put on hold during the day job overtime period. This includes the work I was doing with Froghaus on their title Asparagus. It looks like they’re making excellent progress, though, and I look forward to the release sometime later this year.

I did finally get to do a bit of coding for myself, though. I spent some time this weekend researching Microsoft’s XNA. (XNA is a framework for writing games that will run both on Windows and on the Xbox 360 console.) Microsoft has put out some video tutorials for getting started, and they’re quite nice. I recommend checking out the Creators Club site for more info on XNA. (The video tutorials can be found under Education | Tutorials.)

It seems like pretty cool stuff. For my first attempt at learning the framework, I wrote a Pong clone, complete with a very simple AI, Xbox 360 controller support, and some sound effects. Next up, I checked out TorqueX which seems fantastic, but there’s a couple of show stopping bugs that prevent me from using it much. (It’s still in beta, though, so I’m not really complaining. The bugs had already been reported in the forums by other users, so hopefully they’ll be fixed, and I can play with it some more.)

I’ve got a couple of indie games I’d like to write about, and I intend to keep toying with XNA, and writing about that. Hopefully I won’t go three months without writing a real post again. Thanks for sticking with me during the downtime.

I bought this game without playing the demo. I almost never do that. But it’s from Chronic Logic (the makers of the fantastic Gish), who I trust to show me a good time, and it was getting all kinds of acclaim, including placing well in a couple of GameTunnel’s Best of 2007 categories. I don’t regret that purchase for a second. This is a fun game.

It’s like a cross beween Starcraft and Master of Defense. (Which are both games I’m glad that I own.) You start each level with a limited budget, which you can spend on placing some units onto a battlefield. Then, when you’re ready, you signal the start of the round, and then you have to face off against several waves of enemies with the units you hired.

The units types are pretty diverse, and once you get the hang of controlling them, the game feels like playing a massively multiplayer roleplaying game, but now you got to control the entire group. You’ve got your “tank” unit, the warrior, who can’t do much damage, but can sure take a pounding, and can taunt the enemies to keep them away from your weaker units. There’s the archer, who conversely does tons of damage, but can’t take much of a hit at all. Priests can heal your other units, and if you upgrade them, can bring your units back to life after they die. Druids can give a couple of major buffs to one unit, and bards give minor buffs to everyone. Necromancers instill fear into an enemy, sending them fleeing, as well as summoning a warrior skeleton from fallen foes. My favorite class is the ridiculously powerful, but incredibly expensive wizards, who can pull meteors down onto the enemies heads, summon pets that do incredible damage, and can create a magic shield around any unit, making them virtually invincible. (There are a couple of other units, but these are my favorites.)

Since there are so many different types of units, there are alot of different ways to play the game. You can build a balanced team, putting your warrior types up front, with healers nearby, with a couple of damage dealers in the back. You could go completely aggressive, with all heavy hitters, and try to take the enemies down before they get you. You could be conservative, and use enough healers to keep all of your units alive. You can try to outmaneuver the enemies with your fast moving units, while plinking them down slowly. There’s lots of options, and I love that.

One complaint I’ve read a few times is that the game is too difficult, even on easy. I disagree, but I think that’s because I understood what the developers were going for. You need to find the perfect strategy for every difficult battle. Just throwing out a few warriors, archers, and priests isn’t going to be enough to win every battle. But I love working on perfecting a strategy, and recognize that it’s not for everyone.

I recommend you go grab the demo. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Gameplay movie (from YouTube):

This is a game I’ve been waiting a long time to play. On October 18, 2005 the guys from Moonpod started started posting development information into their dev journal on gamedev.net. (It’s over here if you’d like to read it.) From the moment I saw those first concept sketches and screenshots, I’ve been really excited to get my hands on this game. And now I have it!

The game was released upon the world in late December 2006, which sadly was too late to make it into the running for any of the end of the year game awards, which is a shame, because the game is fantastic. Without a doubt, this is the best indie game I’ve ever played, and I’d be willing to put it on the same level with some of the big budget non-indie games I played this year. Really, I’m not kidding. But I guess I should stop gushing about how much I liked it, and actually tell you about the game.

In Mr. Robot, you play as Asimov, a small, friendly, hard-working maintenance bot. He’s eager to impress his boss so that he can be promoted into a more specialized job, and gain the respect of his peer robots. (Such as Zelda, who Asimov might have a bit of a crush on, the strong bully Samson, and the brooding super-intelligent Raistlin.) But not long after Asimov is activated and begins getting to work, some strange things start happening.

On the starship Eidolon, which is where the game takes place, everything is controlled by a main computer program called HEL. The main job of HEL and all of the worker robots on board the ship is to protect the safety of the passengers and crew, who are all spending the long trip in stasis pods. When HEL starts issuing orders that don’t make alot of sense, and it’s discovered that some of the humans on board might be in danger, it falls to Asimov and his friends to figure out what’s going on.

Mr. Robot has two gameplay modes. In the first, and the one you’ll probably spend the most time in, you control Asimov by arrow keys and two action keys. (Control and Shift, by default.) In this mode, the game is very much like a platformer with puzzles. Asimov doesn’t have any weapons to defend himself, so you’ll have to be careful to stay away from other robots. (Most of which are electified and will damage Asimov if they touch him.) Most of the puzzles involve figuring out how to get across a room full of dangerous objects and other robots. Sometimes this is as simple as pushing boxes around so that you can jump onto platforms, and sometimes you’ll have to improvise, like standing on top of another robot’s head (the only part that’s not electrified) and riding him around.

The second gameplay mode is called Ghost Hack. A ghost in Mr. Robot just refers to a computer program that can be used to hack into another computer system. The robots in Mr. Robot each have one installed, and at the beginning of the game you’ll just have access to Asimov’s. But you’ll get more as the game goes on. In Ghost Hack your ghosts are very similar to characters in a computer roleplaying game. You can equip each one with different weapons and armor. And each one has different skills, similar to the spells you might find in an rpg like Final Fantasy. Zelda is really good at healing, Raistlin is good at damaging, Asimov is more well rounded, and the big brutes like Samson don’t have any at all.

The game also comes with a level editor. While I haven’t had a chance to play with it, and therefore can’t tell you anything about it, I’m hopeful that after the game has been out awhile, there will be a nice set of user created adventures, similar to what you can find for Neverwinter Nights. That would be super sweet.

I recommend you go grab the demo right now. Make sure you have plenty of free time, though. I couldn’t put it down until I’d finished it.

Here’s the trailer, which was posted to YouTube:

In my review for FizzBall, I mentioned that Professor Fizzwizzle was my favorite indie game of last year. I received an email from a reader asking what my favorite indie game of this year is. I think I’m going to have to cheat and declare it a tie between Titan Attacks by Puppy Games (it’s been on my list of games to review since shortly after I started the website) and Eets by Klei Entertainment.

Several months ago, I saw a screenshot of Eets and downloaded the demo thinking that my wife might think it was cute. I started playing it, and I was caught completely unaware by how great this game is.

There’s this little guy, called Eets. He’s collecting puzzle pieces, and needs your help. Unlike the heroes in most games, you don’t get to control Eets directly. Instead, you modify the environment around him by carefully placing various toys and by clicking on the other objects around him. And Eets is an emotional little fellow. His emotional status effects how he moves through the level. If he’s sad, he is far more cautious and unwilling to jump. If he’s angry, he throws caution to the wind and jumps a great distance whenever he encounters a gap.

There are several objects that you can interact with in the environment to help Eets along. There are Prankster Whales who will inhale any object in front of them (including Eets!) and then send them flying through the air. There are clouds of chocolate chip cookies that can fire chocolate chips from a gun placed on their heads. Explosive carts will explode, blowing holes in walls and floors and sending nearby objects flying. Ejection carts will pick up other objects and send them flying when you click on them. This is just a small sample of the objects in the game. There are many more.

What I liked:
There is so much that I liked about this game. I love the Prankster Whales, the exploding pigs shouting “Freedom!”, the Marshomechs, the Merch. (Oh my God! It’s the Merch!) I like that there are sometimes multiple solutions to the puzzles. For example, with the explosive effects you can sometimes punch totally new paths into the levels that weren’t there before. That kind of emergent game play really means a great deal to me.

What I disliked:
When I installed the game on my wife’s computer, we had some trouble getting the text in the tutorials to appear. It made it a little difficult getting started.

Games it reminded me of:
The obvious connections are Lemmings and The Incredible Machine. It’s a platform based puzzle game, so it might draw some comparisons to games like Professor Fizzwizzle, but the controls are so completely different that they don’t have much in common. (But that’s okay, I love them both.)

Recommendations:
This game is brilliant, and was worth your immediate impulse purchase when it cost $19.95. But now they’ve dropped the price to $9.95. I can’t come up with any reason not to buy this game. Go buy it right now!

What happens when you mix Katamari Damacy with Arkanoid? You just might get something that resembles Fizzball, the newest release from Grubby Games. If that name seems familiar to you, and it should, it’s because that’s the company that bought us Professor Fizzwizzle. (Which is, in my opinion, the best indie game of last year.)

In Fizzball, the Professor (and his robotic friends) discover that all the people have fled the islands, and the animals are mysteriously vanishing. Luckily, the professor has a new invention that just might be able to help. He calls it a fizzball. It starts out small, and looks like a simple bubble. But when it comes into contact with something smaller than it, it will pick up the object, and then increase in size. At first it can only pick up butterflies and apples, but pretty quickly it’s big enough to pick up cows and horses. Once all of the animals are safely gathered together, the professor can take them to an animal sanctuary he has constructed, where they can be safe from whatever is causing them to vanish from the islands.

The gameplay is essentially very similar to Arkanoid. You control the professor, riding back and forth on a track at the bottom of the screen. When the fizzball comes down, you simply place him in the way, and the fizzball will bounce back up the screen. If you miss, the fizzball will fall out of play, and you have to start over. When you run out of fizzballs, you’re all done. In addition to collecting animals, you can also break open crates, which often contain money, or items that will make your fizzball grow in size. Sometimes they also contain powerups.

Some of the powerups are simple things, like speeding up or slowing down the movement of the fizzball or inreasing the size of the barrier the professor uses to keep the fizzball in play. Some of them, however, are incredibly powerful. There’s a bulldozer powerup that will make the fizzball smash through any obstacle that gets in its way. This is very handy to get to animals that are sitting behind a pile of crates or a fence. There’s a gravity well powerup that makes the fizzball attract any nearby object, making it so that you just have to get somewhat close to objects instead of having to come directly into contact with them. If you get both of these powerups at the same time, you’ll absolutely fly through the level you’re playing.

But it’s not quite that easy. Somebody has left barrels of toxic waste laying around the island, and if you break those open, it’s bad news for everyone. And once you get a little ways in to the game (the end of the second island) you’ll encounter some enemies that will actually try to hurt you. They have laser guns, and if you get hit, you’ll be stunned and unable to keep your fizzball in play.

What I liked:
Just like with Fizzwizzle, the guys at Grubby Games put alot of work into adding special little touches to the game. When your fizzball collides with a tree, apples or acorns will fall from the branches. When you run into an animal that’s too big to pick up, they’ll respond to it. For example, dogs will bark, ostriches will hide their heads in the ground, and chickens will lay eggs. The soundtrack is also really nice, and fits well with the mood of the game.

What I disliked:
While I enjoyed playing the game, after about a half hour of playing, I was ready to stop. I guess I’m just not very into Arkanoid style games. Of course, I was glad to come back later and play a little more. Perhaps it’s because I didn’t have a big sense of accomplishment when I beat a level. Perhaps I’m just not the target audience. I gave my young step-sister a chance to play it, and she was absolutely hooked.

Games it reminded me of:
The obvious choices here are the previously mentioned Arkanoid and Katamari Damacy. (Though the latter is only in spirit. That’s a totally different style of play.) The mouse control will be easy to pick up for someone who is used to Luxor or any of the games like it.

Recommendations:
I suggest you grab the demo, and give it a whirl. While it isn’t the kind of game that I would normally buy for myself, I think it’s very likely that I’ll be buying a few copies for family members as gifts. I think it’ll be a big hit, especially with the younger members of my family. It’s a very well made game, and I’m excited to see what the guys at Grubby Games come up with next.