Mike messaged me late last week with a challenge: make a game in under 10 hours and in less than a week. This is the result, from the bit of free time I’ve had after work:
You can download the game here:
Download the game
You’ll need XNA installed to run it.
The alpha is public! Tell all your friends!
Download the Windows Installer
Download the Xbox 360 ccgame (creator’s club subscription required)
Enjoy the game! It’s stable, has local multiplayer, and is pretty fun. Pablo did some amazing artwork, and it was great to work with. I’ll be writing something about those cloud shaders soon.
Let me know what you think. I’m still in need of some music, I need more art, I need to change some sounds around, I need more UI, etc. etc. But the game is ready for playing, and the more feedback I get, the better I can make it. I’ll be getting married in a few weeks, but one the dust settles and XNA 3.0 is out, I’ll likely be adding Live support to this game and putting it up on the Creator’s Club Marketplace!
That’s the plan at least - we’ll see how crazy busy my life gets.
More information is included in the readme file, which you should definitely read for the Xbox 360 version (it’s not included in the setup):
View the Readme
About two weeks ago I thought, “hey, it’d be cool to make a game in 24 hours.” That of course meaning 24 hours total, not one day. So I made up a design for what should be a small game, and started off. Then the design grew (as these things do), and the number of players grew (because competition is fun!), and I even added a velociraptor. However, I also had a lot of stuff come up over the last couple weeks, which made me lose track of my time entirely - so I’m probably somewhere between 24 and 48 hours for this so far.
So I wanted to give all you readers a preview of the public alpha I’ll be releasing by the end of the day (assuming I don’t get loaded down with real life priorities between now and then). It runs on Windows and Xbox, supports up to four players, supports mouse and gamepad control (and keyboard if it makes it in), and is pretty entertaining. I just need to stamp out a few bugs, clean up some more interface stuff, and work on the initial difficulty curve before I’m ready to put this up as a public alpha.
The art is almost entirely by Pablo Poffald, a wonderfully keen artist I’ve had the pleasure of working with in the past. I added a few things here and there (and wrote a shader to emulate some Photoshop effects - look for a tutorial on that in a few weeks).
So if everything goes well, I’ll be putting up an Alpha of this later today, for both Windows and Xbox. I’ll of course appreciate any feedback and bug reports.
Zedox interviewed me today about my team’s Dream Build Play entry, Dream Sower. Check it out at Ziggyware!
I’ve been pretty silent lately because I’ve been pushing hard to finish my team’s Dream Build Play entry. I was lucky to get to work with Rockstar, Catalin and Greg on a game we’ve called Dream Sower (formerly Mind Tap).
Dream Sower is a pretty simple game. You’re in control of a Dream Sower - a small robot that is inside a dreamscape. Your goal is to fight off Nightmares and to keep the dream interesting by planting dream seeds. These seeds will alter the landscape, grow trees and refresh the land, all to keep it interesting for the dreamer (who will become bored if you don’t constantly entertain him).
The game has gone through several phases of development, lots of last-minute design changes, and some great testing. In fact, I had such good playtesting experiences that I might just have to write an article on it in the future.
We finished the yesterday (just in time to hear about the extension), and I prepared and uploaded an Xbox 360 version of the game for your enjoyment. I’ll be putting up a PC version and an updated Xbox 360 version later in the week, after I clean out a couple cobwebs in the code.
As always, comments are appreciated.
Download the Xbox 360 ccgame
Download the Windows Installer
(please let me know if either of these has any problems working)
You should definitely play Forces. It’s written by Adam Bielinski, and while it’s not in XNA, I understand he’s working on porting it.
I’ll bet that’s going to be fun to play on the Xbox - it’s already a blast as it is!
