Project Outpost, wow...

So the new project is a pretty cool idea that took a different approach when being designed. The constant failures of all my projects could always be traced back to wanting to do too much with the little experience that I had in game development.

Knowing this I knew that I had to scale back and start with something small. My first idea was to make a breakout clone that had a small story tacked on to the gameplay. The reason behind this choice was to be able to stay motivated and finish the game with a degree of polish. I never started on the coding of the project because I had told myself that I would start as soon as I knew I'd have the time to invest in it but most of the sprites had been drawn.

Two weeks ago my buddy who had worked on Popo contacted me telling me that he had started coding a shmup with base building elements. He showed me a screenshot and I knew right there and then that I had to get involved.

All his artwork was placeholder art taken from various online sources. I figured that since the project had a simple enough scope we'd be able to finish it.

So we got together, discussed some of the games feature and came to a consensus. So far my involvement in the project has been pixel art for all the sprites and tiles but I hope to move onto coding once the graphics have all been assembled.

The project uses XNA 2.0 and C# for development. All graphics were made in Photoshop Elements 4.0 in a 32x32 pixel grid to achieve the SNES-era look. We have already invested a large amount of time into it and reached an important milestone at the beginning of the week:

• Tile engine that picks random tiles from a specific set to avoid the "grid" look.
• Placeable walls that link up together when placed one next to the other.
• Placeable turrets that look in a specific direction and will only fire once an enemy enters its perimeter.
• Monster generation with layered sprites which allows us to make breakable parts.