First Rendering!

Alright! Got something to show up on the xbox 360.

This is the splash screen. It is very basic and may possibly change in the future. For now the screen starts with just the "play" visible. The little red dot scrolls across the screen from the right and once in place "SAGA" fades in. Then the entire screen fades out and will go to the title screen. The splash screen lasts for about a total of 7 seconds, but the player can press a button to skip it.

This is actually taken from my project last year. But still, it proves that things are working. I had to do some debugging to actually get it to work though haha...

Needless to say, I have gotten a lot done today. I spent a good 12-14 hours on PPK today. Nothing like a good work day! :D

Manager Project Intro

This blog has unfortunately been lacking updates so here is one!

Not more than an hour ago I finished programming what I am calling the 'manager project'. This project is a base game project and will work for nearly any 2D XNA game. This project, manages the game's audio, graphics (2D), input, storage, gamers (for xbox360), and scenes (like the title screen).

I use the term 'finished' lightly because I have yet to test it. However, much of this code was previously written a year ago for another project so it was a matter of porting it over to this new project and cleaning it up (mostly documenting). Fortunately, all of that code had been tested a decent amount.

Here is a class diagram of it (not all that pretty).


At the moment this project stands at about 3000 lines of code. Not too bad to start off with. I am sure that as Puni Puni Kingdom grows so will this project. My hopes for this project is that It becomes a strong foundation project for XNA games that I can use in my future games. There is also the possibility of this project receiving a public release if things go well.

Now I can get to programming the game specific code!

Free 12 month Creator Club Trail Membership

I thought that this information may prove to be useful if you want to deploy any XNA games to your Xbox360 (like Puni Puni Kingdom). Of course you must own an Xbox360 for this to be worthwhile, so if you don't then you can stop reading now. Even though the release of PPK is far away, doing this will enable you to play it before the release (beta).

Here are details on getting a free 12 month creator club trail membership.

• First off go to Creators Club Membership and follow the first 3 steps.
• Once you get to step 4 go to Dream Build Play and register to the contest
• After registering go to your My Account and on that page you will see the code for your trail membership.
• Now go back to the membership page and follow step 4.
  

I recommend you do this. It only takes a few minutes and may save you up to $100. It would have saved me $50 last summer. One thing to note is that this offer ends July 6.

Year of the Squirrel

The squirrels have returned! After a long discussion session with Aaron, we came to the conclusion that squirrels will be in Puni Puni Kingdom after all. I am sure you are now wondering what role these cute little creatures will have in PPK. Will they be ninja squirrels? jesters? contortionists? None of those...however, the first is fairly tempting.

Squirrels (or squirrel like creatures) will act as a transportation means. They will be used to quickly move from one town to another especially for transporting resources (punees). Their part may be small but it is still very important. Thank you Doug for the suggestion! Maybe we will name one of them Doug...

In other news, the Game Design Document is very close to being done. So things are really starting to come together and hopefully there will be many updates here soon.

Laying The Code Foundation

I have begun to plan out the code for Puni Puni Kingdom. I have known that having a well laid out blueprint for the code makes development tremendously smoother, but I always seem to get too excited about writing the code. Usually, once I have a rough idea of what I am going to do I rush into it. This is bad because most of the time I end up with inefficient and poorly designed code.

So this time I am finally going to stick to it and invest some real time into building up the code's blueprint. Programming is not just about writing the code after all. I am finding that having this Game Design Document is proving to be invaluable in this endeavor. With it I am able to grasp everything that will make up the game and correctly translate the concepts into this blueprint.

One interesting part about doing this is that in order to completely layout some of the systems I have to do research about them first. This includes doing research for the AI, the weather (particle system), and just some good code design practices. I do enjoy reading about the good design practices, but I find the AI to be the most interesting. Fortunately for me, I took a course in AI and also had a little bit of reinforcement in a game programming course. There are several different avenues I can take for the AI and right now I am trying to plan that out. I am really interested in seeing what comes out on the other side since this is the first real AI system I will write.

A side note: I may post the UML diagram of the code once I finish it. I have a feeling it is going to be very large. Another feeling I have is that it will take awhile to actually complete it.

Challenge Mode

Today I had an idea for an additional gameplay mode. Right now I am just calling it Challenge mode. This mode will be a crossbreed between the Story and Custom game modes. Story follows a story and each level has certain objectives the player must meet to win. Custom has no story and only has one objective - become Puni King first. In Challenge there will be a number of levels, challenges, that the player can choose from. Each challenge will place the player in a scenario and will have to complete different objectives in order to win.

Example:
Noah's Ark
The flood is coming and where is the boat? Get enough Wood Punees in order to ensure the safety of all of the animals.

I am thinking of having multiple difficulty levels for each challenge. The difficulty level would change the computer AI and maybe even the objectives. This is all still in brainstorming stage but I think it is going to end up being in Puni Puni Kingdom.

A side note is that a great attribute of this mode is that the only work required is coming up with the challenges and quickly putting them together (which I hope to make easy). So this wont be adding much more work but we would be getting in return much more quality gameplay (hopefully).

Game Flowchart + GDD

This Game Design Document Template is already proving to be more useful than I had originally anticipated. As I mentioned in my previous post, it is giving us direction and a goal. Up until this point we had only been working on the different gameplay elements and consequently had not really considered the more technical aspects of the game. With me being put in charge of the technical section of the GDD, I decided I should flesh things out as soon as possible. That is exactly what I did today.

One of the things I worked on was making the "Suggested Gameflow Diagram", which is basically an abstraction of the player's experience from turning on the game to turning it off. This is what I came up with.


This is most likely not the final version. Some things are still up in the air and I may have missed something; however, for the most part I think this is correct and represents the gameflow. I may post more GDD content later. We will see.

Game Design Document Plans

A few days ago, while making my rounds at Gamasutra, I came across an interesting and rather useful blog post. In this post, Jason Bakker writes about GDDs (Game Design Document) for indie games and gives a little template of what he finds to be most effective.

Aaron and I have been wanting to write a document like this. So we plan to take this template and will use most of it for our own GDD. A major benifit for using this template is that it gives us direction. With this we will be able to fully document the game design and in a sensible fasion.

So in order to get things moving along Aaron and I meet today. We discussed the GDD and how we will go about writing it out. We did what came naturally - what you always do in school group projects. We split up the work evenly. Aaron will fill out the story part and the gameplay concepts while I will fill out the more technical sections. I have already started on my part and will post some of it very soon.

I hope that we get this done relatively soon so that we can continue to move forward with the game. Things are going to slow for me - I want to really get things rolling!

More Brainstorming

Gameplay Overview: Part 3 is being delayed because some things are still up in the air and that is what we have been working on. One of the things we brainstormed about was actually fueled by a friend and a reader. He jokingly asked if squirrels were going to be in the game. Well, we gave it a great amount of thought and almost went with it. We considered having some additional creatures in the world, and may eventually end up doing so, but our goal is to finish PPK. Adding too much content is not going to help with that.

It is unfortunate that we cant have everything that we want in PPK, but we definitely will make sure that PPK does not suffer from it. If things go well then the features that we are holding back on will be released in either a sequel or expansion packs or something. That is of course far down the road, so we are not putting much thought on it for now. Time will tell.

I will get Gameplay Overview: Part 3 out as soon as possible!