Once again it has been a long time since I posted a dev blog. Especially one that had any decent video. Tonight’s blog has a lot of new stuff. Here’s a bunch of stuff that I’ve worked on:

  • Got professional sound done! I worked with Marc Carlton to get sound effects done. I gave him a list of everything I needed and he got it done quickly and in budget. I expected raw audio but he actually delivered an XACT project, complete with RPCs and everything. Working with Marc was a dream and I highly recommend him.
  • Found some new music: I wasn’t pleased with the old music. The new music is still not perfect (too repetitive) but I have to let it go for now. No music budget left and out of time to tinker with it. Thanks to DavidKBD for the music.
  • Maxed out my laptop’s hard drive capacity (only 100GB drive) capturing uncompressed video during playtesting. Cloned 100GB laptop drive to 500GB drive….plenty of space now.
  • Implemented the sound project: this required almost a complete rewrite of my AudioManager class.
  • Created an XNA 4.0 PC project which solved a lot of my porting problems trying to go from 3.1PC to 4.0Xbox.
  • Implemented Call of Duty style healing: if you avoid taking damage for a period of time you will heal rapidly.
  • Fixed scoring system: it didn’t work at all. Now it does.
  • Lots of tweaks and balances: Sound, minigun damage, heal timers, rocket damage and a lot of little bugs have been fixed.
  • Implemented slow motion at end of game. It used to jump to the endgame screen immediately when the last shot was fired or the timer ran out. Now it goes into slow motion, which looks pretty awesome.
  • Implemented taunts, spawn sounds.
  • Implemented and tweaked endgame screen.
  • Fixed problems with pause game screen and controller disconnect screens.
  • Lots of play-testing which led to bug fixes and tweaks to improve level-of-fun.
  • MADE THE DECISION TO GET SINGLE-PLAYER/COOP MODE VS BOT ATTACK INTO THE FIRST RELEASE! This is a big decision for me because it means a greater time commitment before I realize any potential return on my investment. But, I think it’s the right decision for the game and gamers. I’m not sure if the DreamBuildPlay version will have single-player. Probably not. But the XBLIG version needs to.

 

There’s probably more but that’s everything I can think of tonight. Here’s a video, it really doesn’t do the game justice since I captured it by myself. So far 2-3 person Whirly battles have been a blast. I took the time to capture this in HD so watch it in HD!