Avoid the Asteroids Video

Avoid the Asteroid

The game has taken a hit to productivity. It's not that we don't want to finish it but more that school is interfering.

However my game developing hasn't stopped completely. In my Advanced Design and Reengineering class we have a project where we have to introduce a new technology to the class and develop something with it. Our group has decided to use XNA which is awesome enough because I didn't really get the chance to work with it in Outpost (having focused primarily on graphics).

The game we decided to work on is an Asteroid type game but instead of shooting at the asteroids you just have to avoid them. Your little saucer follows the cursor so it's a very simple game. I have been slaving at it for the past two days and got it to a playable state. Well it's more than just playable; I added sound and introduction/game over screens.

Sounds Effects

So the game is progressing well but we are slowing down a tad bit. Being much closer to the end means we have to start smoothing the rough edges which is a lot tougher to do. Nevertheless we march on.

I started dabbling in sound effects over the weekend. I bought a cheap mic (Sony F-V120) and walked around my place trying to find stuff that makes noise. I'm using Audacity to get rid of some background noise and apply effects to try and distort the source of the sound (and to also make it sound more like the actual emulated noise).

I was considering getting our SFX from a free source but some of the sites I visited requested that I credit every author for every SFX I used instead of the site itself. Well considering that I needed a boat load and that they were all of sub par quality I decided to make my own. My stuff isn't great but it's better than most of the free stuff I found.

Not a Big Update

I haven't done too much work in the past week. A lot of it has to do with school and the rest has to do with the fact that I'm about 90% done with assets that need to be drawn. The 10% that is left is by far the most time consuming stuff (title screen and such).

However I did manage to make the window for the resource counter and made a new boss enemy: a mech! Here's a gif showing the mech walking. Sadly there's a graphical error in the firing but it's barely noticeable (it's already fixed for the game).

(click the image to see it animated)

Oh My Gooses!

If this isn't an important milestone I don't know what is! After a couple weeks of hard work and late nights we managed to implement some wicked stuff including but not limited to:

• Multiple weapons
• GUI for switching weapons
  
• A freakin' beating heart!
• Our custom font

(Click on the thumbnail for a full screenshot)

There was a lot of optimization on the back side since we were already getting weird slow downs. We found out, through various sources, that early optimization is bad so we were extra careful only removing various memory allocations inside our update and drawing loops that weren't necessary. I think we did a pretty good job (by we, I mean my partner who learned to use the CLF profile and Nprof pretty efficiently).