Damn you Anthony, seeing you get one made me do it. That and COD4.
I did a bad, bad thing.
May 31st, 2008Does Samus Live on Norion?
November 10th, 2007My 4 year old son just ask me in his most serious voice, “Does Samus live on Norion?” I was not sure whether to laugh or tell him she just visits Norion.
He asked much like I would have asked does Micky Mouse live in the Magic Kingdom when I was his age. Mario and Link are his Saturday morning cartoons. He wanted to be Luigi for Halloween. He might watch one TV show every month or so. He would rather play Nintendo or play games on the computer.
Someone had better make a theme park based on games for his generation…
The scariest part is how much he is learning while playing these games. Because many of them require the ability to read, he can now read. I don’t mean a couple words, I mean words he has never seen before and figure out what they mean kind of reading.
The other strange thing that has happened is in reguard to some of the characters that you of I would call “TV characters”. He has never seen them on TV. He is probably more familiar with the versions in flash based web games on sites like www.nickjr.com than he is with the TV version. To him the TV show is almost an ad for the web site, not the other way around.
Anyway he is asking to play on the web right now so I’d better get going…
Warriors of the Shining Star Demo 1.
September 3rd, 2007Wow, putting in the keyboard controls went faster than I thought. I highly recommend playing with a 360 controller. The game was designed for it. Playing with the keyboard is an exercise in aggravation.
Also if you need it here is the XNA framework from Microsoft. You will need DirextX9 and possibly .net 2.0 as well.
Warriors of the Shining Star is meant to be a fun action shooter; very much like Robotron or Gauntlet with a bit of RPG elements added in. Right now it has more action elements than RPG elements but they will come.
Controls are simple (with a 360 controller).
- Left Stick - moves.
- Right Stick - shoots.
- Right shoulder is you special ability. The Warrior class starts with Discipline, slow motion mode.
- A Button – Selects
Left/Right DPad – changes weapons (demo only has one active weapon)
With the keyboard:
- WASD – is the Left stick.
- IJKL – is the Right stick.
- E or Enter – is the A Button
- Z/C – changes weapons.
There are two executables in the rar file: the normal one runs at 1024×768 and the second at 640×480. There are some performance considerations at 1024×768 as some of the shaders I am using can cause you to become very fill limited, especially the ground for near the beginning.
In the demo level there are two weapon power ups that will help greatly if you can find them. There really is no set end to the demo, but the flame thrower miner is meant to be a kind of mini-end boss.
Also the audio is almost completely untouched; I have put in the sound system but don’t really use it for more than the shooting sound. Also please ignore the temp art.
Have fun.
Space Wars Tactics source code.
September 3rd, 2007I realize I have not posted in a while. Real life kind of took over. Hopefully I can get back to regular posting.
If get the time I’m going to try to post a single level demo for Warriors of the Shining Star. I just need to add keyboard support for those of you who don’t have 360 controllers hooked to your PC’s. Hopefully that will be tonight or tomorrow.
War and Tactics in Space!
February 28th, 2007I have not been posting because I have been working on my top secret project for the Dream Build Play competition: Space War Tactics! The Dream Build Play competition is a series of game development competitions centered on a Microsoft product called Game Studio Express. Many of you have probably seen what will be my entry for the main portion of the contest: Warriors of the Shining Star.
For the first part of their contest they gave everyone two weeks to make a mod of their Space Wars demo. I decided that their demo seemed like a sub game to a larger game. To that end I decided to make the larger game (or at least as much of it as two weeks will allow). Inspired by Advanced Wars I made a tactical layer on top of the existing combat system. You build your fleet up and with it capture bases and fight the other teams.
With only me to work on it I will probably be beat out in the competition by larger teams who can make more content than I can. Ahh well. But it was definitely fun to work on. Now I just need to wrangle together four people so I can play a larger game of it, the AI is a little easy to beat after a few games.
You can download it here.
Enjoy,
-tom