Kyle Schouviller

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.

This is something I’ve had in a semi-finished state for a long time. It’s just had a bug I haven’t had time to really look at for a while, and the shader wasn’t that special. This is a terrain generator with a focus on RTS-style terrain. That means clearly walkable and non-walkable regions, and flattened walkable regions.

I may write an article on this, in which case I’ll release the source. There’s already a paper on this method, but it skips some of the important parts (like generating the noise) in favor of covering the more inventive algorithms, so I figure I could write something to cover it all (time allowing).

You can download the demo below. WASD and QE control the camera, clicking and dragging with the mouse rotates the camera, holding F will display walkable areas, and pressing G will generate a new terrain.

Download the Windows Installer

Because Mykre couldn’t wait to see it, here’s the source code for the wisp demo I recently made. I cleaned up the code a bit and added pretty liberal comments so you can really tell what’s going on. Let me know what you think!

Download the Source Code

The other day I had a chance to look at the PS3’s UI, and I just couldn’t get over the slowly-moving, wavy shape in the background. So I figured I’d make it in XNA. I was pretty close on my guess about how it worked.

It just uses a constantly deforming plane and a pretty simple shader. The variation is just a lot of math modulated by position on the plane, time, and a random “seed” value. That way, while it has some coherency in its movements, it still has plenty of variation to make it interesting.

Try it out.

I thought I’d post a quick note to post this, a demo of animation blending using FlatRedBall (along with some other nice tricks). This only took a day to put together, and most of that was finding the assets and debugging the movement code (since I wanted to show the blending).

The demo program can be downloaded from my portfolio page, and runs in 720p. The audio is a little weird, but it’s probably because I messed a lot with the sound processing in XACT. Enjoy!

I’ve completed an alpha version of the screen saver I’ve been talking about, and it’s now available for download.

Get it here
Edit: The screen saver works! Just copy ParticleLife.scr and FlatRedBall.dll to your Windows/System32 directory, then right click ParticleLife.scr and select Install.

To run this you’ll need to copy the .scr and .dll to the windows directory (I hear Windows\System32 is the place to put it, but you can just right click the .scr and choose install too). Then make sure you have the following prerequisites installed:

The .NET Framework 2.0
DirectX 9.0c (run this even if you have it already - you may be missing files required for XNA)
XNA Runtime 2.0

I know it’s a pain (and ironic that this screen saver is windows-only), but the alternative is…well, not using the screen saver!

The original inspiration was this piece by Hawk: Life. I saw it and thought, “that would make a nice screen saver, and a good test of some GPU programming.” So I went for it. It’s not as pretty as the flash version (the lines aren’t as clean), but I think it looks decent for programmer art, and it runs nicely (and almost all of the calculation is done on the GPU - which was my major focus when making this).

There aren’t any options in this version. Eventually I want it to support user-specified particle counts, but I can’t really do that without storing the value somewhere. The most popular place for screen saver parameters is the registry, and I can’t go writing all over that without an installer/uninstaller (so if you decide you don’t like this it doesn’t leave a bunch of dead information in your registry). So - if this screen saver is a hit (goodness knows smaller things I’ve made have been huge hits), I’ll probably clean it up a bit and add some settings.

You’ll also need a graphics card that supports Pixel Shader Model 2.0 - I created this primarily as a test of some graphics techniques - not necessarily just to make a screen saver (you can compile that flash as an exe with exit-on-input to use it as a screen saver). I’m not doing any detection at the moment - so if it doesn’t run

For the XNA programmers in the audience, I’ll be releasing the source code for this soon.

Check this out: 10,000 particles running on my new system (with no gfx card!) at a consistent 30fps, all with different velocities, distance blurring, etc.:

I had 65,000 running just fine, but it rendered as a big white blob, which didn’t look very presentable. I’ll cover the techniques behind this sample soon, along with providing full source. Most of this is actually done on the (motherboard-embedded) gpu though - I was surprised it ran well at all!

So stay tuned - I’ve got a couple graphics samples in the works that I’m hoping to start filling my website with soon. I’ll release this one once I clean up the presentation a little (it’s not quite what I want - yet). I’m hoping to make it a screensaver similar to Hawk’s recent flash sample entitled Life. Anyone see the irony?

So, I’d like to add some more links to the XNA Arcade tracker I’m running so I can properly test the program as I develop it further. So, if you’d like your game added, please send me the following (or post it in the comments of this post):

Game Name
Game Download Link (see below)
Executable Name and Location within Zip File
Game Image (a 407×170 image file, uploaded on the web)
Developer Name
Website Link
Game information text (about 6 lines of information about your game)

For the downloadable, you’ll need to zip the contents of your project’s compiled bin/x86/Release/ directory (please compile in release mode). You should navigate to that directory, select all files and add them to an archive (as opposed to zipping up the “Release” folder itself). The Executable name and location will then be something like “myGame.exe.”

You’ll then need to upload that zip file somewhere, and include that link in your submission (I’m sorry, I don’t have the webspace to host everyone’s games).

Frustrated over the difficulty of distributing XNA games? Don’t like having to package installers all the time? I sure am.

I figured it’s about time we had a front-end for normal people to get and play our XNA games. As a community we’ve made some amazing stuff, but it’s still difficult to get casual gamers playing our games. Enter XNA Arcade.

This program will grab a games listing from one or more xml trackers on the web, which it will use to populate a categorized listing of games. The user can then navigate to a category, choose a game, then download it, all through the app. Once the game is downloaded, it will install itself, and the user can just click the Play button in the application to play the game.

Easy!

And better - as a developer, all you have to do is zip up your compiled “bin” directory and upload it somewhere, then get your game’s information in a tracker. Since XNA Arcade will install the DirectX, XNA and .NET 2.0 redistributables with itself (it doesn’t do this yet), you don’t have to worry about the end-user having them!

Like the title says, this is still an early alpha (i.e. functional prototype). It’s not necessarily secure, robust or cleaned up yet, but if you’d like to try it out, you can download it here:

http://www.kyleschouviller.com/files/gametest/XNAArcade.zip

I figure with some more development and community support, we could get a couple sites hosting games/trackers which developers can submit their games to. We could even add some ratings system or some other features.

Let me know what you think!

Added: I should note that Chris Hildenbrand, the artist of Shuggy and SSH, did the interface graphics. A great thanks to him.