Saturday 7 June 2008

K2 Prototype Finished

It's over. In all the confusion, I forgot to link anything. Here's the thread to get it from, again.


K2 Prototype For TIGSource Procedural Generation Compo from Aubrey Hesselgren on Vimeo.

So, this is less than 22 days work in my spare time, most of it without the benefit of internet. I learned a fair amount (including: try even harder not to re-invent the wheel). The main thing I learned is that most people cannot get XNA to run.

My first move for continuing this project is to move it over to something a little more compatible. I've started using SDL.NET and the Tao Framework. This doesn't give me platform freedom (since it's based on .NET), but I'll at least be able to let more people play it this way. I mean, even if this isn't a popularity contest, it's good to let more people play so that you have more of a chance of decent feedback.

Moving over to OpenGL isn't going to be an insurmountable task (since I'm familiar, but rusty with it - it was used for the original K), but it's going to be a fair amount of work re-building all the crutches that XNA pre-built for me... nice, clean, clear libraries for maths, vectors, importing fonts... a great sound tool in XACT (which allowed me to get all my sounds in, including random pitch offsets, game-play controlled pitch shifting, and 3D positioned sound in less than 4 hours from start to end).

I'll miss XNA. I'm sorry to leave it behind. It's just that while the installation process for the end-user remains such a clusterfuck, it's not quite worth the pain of realizing that you make up probably 20% of your own audience.

1 comment:

n0wak said...

Looking good. My subwoofer definitely appreciates the added music too.

Unfortunately, I'm one of those 'XNA-less' people so I can't play it :(