The Beginnings of Game Development

Ziggyware.com is one of the best sites for XNA resources and has been around since the beginning.  It including Articles, Tutorials, News and even an Image of The Day section where you can look at what other people are doing.

But that’s not all. One of the things that sets Ziggyware apart from others is that about two or three times each year, it holds a “XNA Articles Competition”. The result of this competition usually takes form in lots of top-quality tutorials and articles about stuff you can do with XNA. Ziggyware wants to repay the talented people that make these tutorials, so he gives them prizes. Because of this, from time to time, there’s a call for donations, and now is such a time.

If you like to use the articles on Ziggyware, and if you want to help the site grow, prosper and continue to provide a constant stream of good XNA articles, you now have the chance to do so, by going on Ziggy’s site, and seeing how you can help.

I’m currently a bit out of action at the mo which is hampering my efforts to get anything done but It seems even my good friend Charles from Dark Omen games has been plundering on without my help now and created some interesting Blender results with his own hands and imagination, check it out here on his blog, there is another video on the same concept which just freaks me out.

So,as I have mentioned before, I am part of a group called Dark Omen Games, and we have finally got around to getting a Creators Club Premium membership so we can start to release our games on the Xbox Live Creators Games.

As my post title suggests, the first game we are putting up is Nebulon, the brain child of Dave Bonner.

Nebulon is a 2D top down shooter, you fly your ship around looking for alien “photons” to warp in so you can shoot them. You have to be quick though, they like to gang up and if to many get together there is the chance of a wormhole opening up and something nasty coming out..

Here are a few screen shots:

As you can see it can get pretty funky.

Here is a clip (pre play test drop):

If you have a Creators Club Premium account, please get on a give it a play test, we really would love to hear your feed back on it so we have a solid, robust game going into peer review.

You can leave your comments here, on the play test forum for Nebulon or on our blog.

So get your trigger fingers at the ready and start blasting some photons!

  Looks like some people have been watching the new Star Trek film just a few times....

Posted on DeJohn's blog is a screenshot of the new "Loading" image for your Avatar in XNA GS 3.1.  I must say it looks cool and cannot wait, I think the first thing to try is to also crate your own loading annimation.

I'm all for just changing it to a Red colour, got to Love those Kilngon transporters.

Quote

http://blogs.msdn.com/dejohn/archive/2009/05/11/what-to-do-while-an-avatar-loads.aspx

Well I’ve been busy of the last week and even more so today.  I’ve finally setup my new blog (the old one will remain for now as I’ve stated) and got a little intro up there already.  Not to get too excited yet though, I’m still working on chapter 1 for the 3D modeling tutorial, but it’s coming along nicely.  I’m always very critical when it comes to the beginning of such things as if you don't set the stage properly and get everyone to understand the terminology to be used, you can get in to all sorts of troubles later on.

Still if you want to know how I've got here, it’s an interesting read.  yuck.

On another note, further to my introduction to Dark Omen Games, I’ve dropped a little note on the new website for our merry little band, absolutely no mentions of Kate Winslet’s acceptance speech at all, hmmm.

So if your still interested to follow my ramblings in this world and a little 3D tutorial nonsense, find me over here at http://faux-motion.blogspot.com/

For a little something to slip in to while I get the first post read, head over to Stromcode, Rick Strom has a few Blender tutorials there which are pretty good IMHO, a bit more of a do as I say tutorial rather than a learn how to do, but it’s good to walkthrough nonetheless.

Another honorable mention (thanks to Charles “RandomChaos” Humphrey again), is that there is a special XNA Exporter for Blender, which can be found on the Triple B Games site, this python script sorts out your Blender export and even adds collision boundaries for your models, saving you time calculating them in game (if that’s what you need), always worth a look.

That’s it from me here for now, so see you over at Faux motion in the future, don’t forget to update your blogroll.

This is Darkside signing out (of spaces for now)