Missed a Month.. and why

It has finally ended up being a month since my last post into this Blog.

I was doing very well with my daily posts until that time, so now i am going to explain some of the reasons there has been no posting, and some ideasof why there will probably be very few more, until maybe things change again... there is always change of course. Sometimes however away from developing games.

So what happened on the 15th ?
Several things happened or were in the proces of happening. I will describe a few of them in no particular order of importance (i think it took all these reasons and more to stop me).
1. Was in the middle of upgrading Berzerkatron to Xna 4.0. this should be something fairly straight forward, but it isn't. It wasn't realy designed to be either, which is a pity. However the real reason this is on my list is the fact that doing this kind of work and research smacks of my day job. The job where i write games occasionally, but lately have ben converting games from one sku to another. This kind of work is NOT creating games, and that is why i was on Xna. It would be interesting to see how my time would have worked out if the upgrade had been automatic, or even if a little upgrade script had been provided.
2. When i am coding my Xna games, i spend an inordinately large amount of time doing it, though in all honesty i think more time is spent on balance and level design than actual coding. Spending all this time means that my other creative endeavours always end up on the back seat. I figured that if i wasn't coding Xna games (too much fun), then i could be pursuing my other ideas.
3. February is exactly 1 year from when i sent off my book to 17 places. they said they would get back to me in a time frame anything from 60 days to 10 months. That time is now used up and expired. So it must be time to try something else, i still believe in my childrens book and how helpful they can be to teach kids to read and more importantly find enjoyment in reading. So how can i be writing games while needing to spend time on these books.
4. It was a break for the holidays and i got ill off and on the whole time. So taking time off to be ill seemed like a good thing.
5. I always wanted to Blog more about the development work here at work at Mass Media, only... My boss and i also think some of the other employees are a little scared i might reveal something that we have signed a non disclosure abuot. So i feel really restricted on what i can say. Which realy bums me out. We do all this great Sony Home stuff and yet, i can hardly say a word, no reveals, no secrets.. nothing. So with that pressure i have hardly ever mentioned what i do, apart from some stories etc I wrote a long time ago, and thoroughly enjoyed, as i hope you folks did.
6. Work is gonna kick my butt more. Yeah, work pressure has mounted, i am now working a 6 day week and this is tough on my family as well as me. With this reduced home time, it would be hard to code much anyway. Still the poducts we are working on are gonna make people very happy.

So whats next ?
I think i will be altering my Web page for SorceryGames once i get something to edit it with, my hard drive crash 6 weeks ago really put a pain into doing a lot of stuff i was really organised to do. Once it is locked up, i will be working on my new web site, which should be http://www.ab4k.com/ That stands for Adventure Books For Kids. I could not get the 'C' for children, bah!  I need artists if any of you out there think you are talented enough for childrens adventure books. I need approximately 22 pictures per book. I am going for high quality, though i am not too concerned about art style so much as quality level. So if you are interested, please drop me a line at voodoochief@sorcerygames.com.

As for this Blog, as it is my Sorcery Dev blog, I think i need to take a break from it. which saddens me cos it also means i need to take a break from my fellow Xblig peers. this group of indivduals has really impressed me in the last year, through their dedicationa nd commitment to not only help themselves, but also to help each other, and also me. I do not know of any community like it and I certainly hope i can get my books going to a more sedate pace (hours commited by me a week), and then hopefully i can come back and get on with more Xblig codiing myself. My one man army is suffering from not enough hours in a day.


Special Mesage to Xblig Devs,
Fellow Xbligers, you know you can find me on twitter, i canot leave the community, it is too cool. So if you need a reveiw of a game done, i will still try very hard to do these. Though i will not be going and lokoing around for stuff to reveiw. Instead i will rely on people tweeting about needing one done, or just plain DM me, i would love to keep up with what everyone is producing.

So for now, i have to say bye.. I hope this will only be for a short time.

Da Voodoochief (Rob)

So i removed the Avatar code (Xna 3.1->4.0)

After all the issues last night i have decided to remove all Avatar code for now. The chnages look just too all encompassing.and i need to get something going, if only for my sanity. Though sanity aside, it is always best to divide and conquer a problem if at all possible, and i am of the beleif that all problems can be broken down in some way.

So what happened after removal of the Avatar code? Well i ended up with 158 Errors, woohoo! Now there is something i can dig into, only i wonder how many more are hiding under these, as is usually the case.

So my next Error is... (unexpected)
"Error 1 The type or namespace name 'Vector2' could not be found (are you missing a using directive or an assembly reference?)"
I also get similar errors for Vector4 and Color (now i knew Color had changed but the Base Vector type declarations?). I guess it's time to see what i should be presenting these as.


After about 25 minutes searching, i have not found an answer. I have a couple of the Samples from the App hub and they seem to work perfectly. So i have no clue at the moment what is wrong with some of my types. I also see the same issue with 'Rectangle', i am sure one cure will fit most of these.
 
Off to work now. But if anyone knows what is wrong or even a lead, i would love to hear it.

3.1 -> 4.0 Xna First Errors

My First Errors... Most likely what you will also see.

So what should i attack first? The component link issues or the Pixelshader. I guess i should go with the component and unleash a real torrent of errors :) It is more fun that way. Fixing the Pixelshader will only solve one problem.

• So i simply right clicked the references in the project and deleted the offending system.xinq.xml.
• Microsoft.Xna.Framework could not be found.  So i did the same with that. Not sure what repurcussions this might have later.

So onto my Pixelshader issue. While looking around the web for help on this i found this most excellent Blog where someone has done what i am doing now. Check it out here. So the change was quite simple. I just had to change the pixelshader name (yeah the bloom was using PixelShader to PixelSdr and i also saw that it had updated the 1_1 to 2_0 shader version. So onto my next issue.

My next issue that appears is becaue i am using Avatars. And as such on the PC it draw a set of polys to show the bones of the Avatar. Great for making sure you can prototype you game on the Pc, but bad cos now i need to fix whatever is wrong. The offending error is....
'XNA Framework HiDef profile supports a maximum of 16 simultaneous vertex elements'. This has caused me to figure out the .FBX animation files for my avatars are not compatible with Xna 4.0. So here is a link to the new ones New Avatar Anims. Yet still i am having issues with the Faint.fbx. the very same error as before. Not sure what to do, maybe i will attack it tomorrow night, so far i am losing this battle. I could just remove Avatars for now and re-introduce them later, but i still need them. I will also have a look at the new Avatar sample program for Xna 4.0 from here. Oddly enough the Avatar sample does not have errors in the same Faint.fbx file, though it does have a lot of warnings as expected. not sure what the solution is at present.

That is all i can do for tonight. I know i am not the most expert at this kind of upgrade, but i am also sure not everyone is great at this.

Time commited so far... 1.5 hours

G'night

Getting Xna 4.0

Should be simple enough Dotcha think ?

Just go to the downloads section of the App Hub and there ya go? Well not so simple.

Here is the link and what it says on App hub. Some more links that seem to confuse more than solve my issues. Really, why would you not at this point just give 2 clickable options? One for Phone 4.0 and one for windows/Xblig.
What ya get on App Hub

This is the link everyone will want that just wants the Game Studio 4.0 for developing for Xblig and Windows.
Xna Game Studio 4.0 download link

This next link is where you can find all the Visual studio express downloads. Much easier than trying to find an actual link on the app Hub.
Visual Studio Express Download Link

Oh, i installed the Visual Studio first (i found that instruction somewhere and felt it made sense.


Next post should be me attempting to solve some of the first problems that we encounter in the upgrade. I intend to Blog the whole procedure to make it faster and easier for the next person.

Teleporters are cool

I got my level start and end teleporters in yesterday. Which is good, cos now i can see the proper timing when starting and ending a level. Which is an important factor to the fow of the game. Especially if you are like me and counting how long a level lasts, to see if it is tweaked right, and also that it meets the criteria of sweet, fast levels to bring people into the game. Also of course because Trials are only so long.

So i borrowed some graphics that the artist did for Pellmell for now (it looked nice and had enough frames to use). It works quite well. So now the flow is in, i teleport into the game, the enemies start shooting 2 seconds after, and once i have collected all the civilians (though soon, some may die!) the teleporter dutifully appears and waits for you to enter, when it will then fade out over 1 second. Taking you with it, and the level also fades.

I also got in 5 of the level (scene) wall setup/designs. These are wheer all the enemies have to be written and placed. That of course is where there is going to be real fun. I also made a spawn list of places to spawn the civillians at. Makes it much tider than them all appearing in one corner, or worse in walls or in no go areas.

Laters

Berzerkatron Gameplay Video #2

This is my current work in progress for my next Xblig game. I will explain after the video a lot more details about what is actually going on in the video, that might give you some idea of how far along i am in the creation process.



Well that was fairly hectic eh!

1. The walls change color depending on what has hit them, you=red, enemy bullets=yellow and your bullets=blue. This is just to get some nice wall reaction code in and working. What i end up doing with it, only time will tell. currently i think i will just have to make the splash of color cross fade happen much faster. I like the effect, just needs to be more frenetic.
2. The red splats on the floor and the drops of stuf that fly off you and enemies. This is about perfect for my vision. Of course when you are fighting robots that color will be yellowish most likely, along with say green blood for the aliens. the over the top splat on the screen might have to be toned down a bit. I am not sure at the moment.
3. The odd green boxes around stuff is my test detection areas. I should have turned them off for this video, but i quite liked seeing them on, you can see what i am testing for wall collisions then (rect-rect). Bullets and enemies hitting my bullets and me are all radius checks though.
4. The dancing dude is my son who kindly donated 3 photos to be in the game. He is a civilain and it is your job to save as many as you can on a level. In fact the teleporter to get you off a level won't appear until you collect all the civilians that are alive on a level. I look forward to doing some excellent audio cues for the civilians (think comical and ott)
5. The spinning stars are currently my money. they should be coins, but i had this animation and no coin one. You collect money to be able to afford powerups and enhancements at the end of each level. There is the possibility that i will make the shop available at all times, just pause to spend.
6. Currently the game only has some very basic enemies, and as you can see they use existing sprites from  A Shooter, not the best looking this for this game of Robots and Ninjas and Aliens etc.
7. There will be firepower powerups and more, but i have not coded them yet. Although i do have them designed.
8. I have all my fading into and out of the levels fully working. Though i could do with attaching it to the green boxes, lol

Next up is adding the teleporter control and features. Then some Real gameplay (bullet, movement enemy and enemy bullet speeds balanced). Then it will be to design 30 levels or so... hehe


I hope you enjoyed this little show and tell, if ya have any comments or suggestions, please feel free.
Laters

WM7 development onGoing

Well we have been stuggling to get our WM7 game going. It is of course our Dreamland Chronicles Game. This appeared to be the easiest to port over from Xblig, and i love easy. Only it has taken a bit longer than anticipated.

Mostly the delays have been caused by two things. Not having a WM7 phone to actually test load times on (boy they must be slow!). Aaaand the Back button rquirements. my prgrammer did not take seriously enough the requirement and so did not account for all the places that the back button could be pressed. He did most of them however and now we are over what appear to be the load time issues. Maybe we are finally on our way to test the waters of WM7.

Some people have been telling me what a mess Microsoft has made of the WM7 phone launch. Things like they have only sold 40K phones in their first week, while Droid phones sold 400K in their first weekend. I have no idea how much of this is true. Though i do have to say my friend is a reliable source of information. I just hope the sites he visits are all the naysayers and thats it.

Testing the waters is important for me and my programmer freind who is converting this code to WM7. If it looks worthwhile, then we can afford to upgrade machines to do this development (my main PC is not good enough for WM7 emulation). If this market is not happening, then i can just save myself a bundle of money. Though i would love it to do well.

One side effect of the WM7 development is the alteration or influence to my Xblig designs. I will from now on take into account an alternative control scheme for any game i make. along with that, i will also plan on the back button working universally even on the Xbox.

Good luck for everyone else that is deciding on venturing into this new and unkown territory.

g'night

Presence in Xblig Games

I have always loved the idea of presence, and in some Xbla titles i have had the pleasure of working on, I did indeed use presence. Xblig and it's Xna studio has some built in functionality for doing this same thing, though with a few restrictions. I used the presence in A Shooter and i have to say tat seeing it first hand like that, watching in a way your friends progress from boss to level etc is really a great feeling.

Making adding it into the code well worth while.

// first i started by enumerating my Own presence values, for the ones i wanted to use.
enum PRESCENCE {
MENU = 0,
STAGE,
COOPSTAGE,
BOSS,
};

// then i simply call this routine with the state i want to be known, it basically converts my own enum, to the Xna studi type and sets it
public void SetPresenceForAllPlayers(int _state)
{
  foreach (SignedInGamer sig in Gamer.SignedInGamers)
  {
   switch (_state) {
    case ((int)PRESCENCE.MENU):
     sig.Presence.PresenceMode = GamerPresenceMode.AtMenu;
     break;
    case ((int)PRESCENCE.STAGE):
     sig.Presence.PresenceMode = GamerPresenceMode.Stage;
     sig.Presence.PresenceValue = cLevel.iLevel+1;
     break;
    case ((int)PRESCENCE.COOPSTAGE):
     sig.Presence.PresenceMode = GamerPresenceMode.CoOpStage;
     sig.Presence.PresenceValue = cLevel.iLevel+1;
     break;
    case ((int)PRESCENCE.BOSS):
     sig.Presence.PresenceMode = GamerPresenceMode.BattlingBoss;
     break;
  }
 }
}

Good luck implementing your own Presence. I have posted this here, just so people can see how easy it is to really implement

Laters

Another post about the unkown Xblig

So i didn't post yesterday, and for good reason. I was out in the desert with my son doing some Boy Scout camping trip. Now this trip had a fair number of boys aging from 10-16. A wonderful demographic of Xbox owners maybe?

Yes, they were mostly Xbox owners, and they also had Live accounts. Woohoo! i have hit a jackpot here. Let me find out what they know about Xblig as i pimp my wares. And whaddya know... They didn't know anything about Xblig. I also had to describe where the tab is now in the New dash, so that made it harder. The main point here is they didn't know about it. Not one of them. Made me a bit sad to be honest. how am i supposed to sell to people that don't even know the channel exists, never mind my game.

At this point i think the  whole marketing thing is overhyped. I have spent more time and money on marketting my game in a channel that noone knows exists. Done.

Laters

All Games Are Crap part 2

Not content with writing about games being crap just once. I home come back to do it again.

So if it isn't the good or bad in games that allow them to do well, what could it be. Why is it that some games do so well compared to others in the same or similar fields. Well to start with i want to say, advertising. Yup, as simple sounding as that is, it is not simple. In fact there are many aspects to advertising a game. From the posters and artwork you see, to screenshots and carefully leaked ideals of gameplay that the new game brings. some may say that advertising (and marketing) do not play a huge role in the selling of a game. I have to refute that idea right away. Why would a large publisher spend 2 million dollars advertising and promoting a game if it did not need to?

In the end a game must be seen by the potential buyer to actually get them to buy it.

Of course advertising a game that has a big 30 million dollar budget is a nescessity, as seen by the huge budgets i just mentioned. What would the sales be like of Darksiders for example if they had not spent so much on blanket advertising and marketing. Just getting that game to E3 must have cost a fortune, and in theory that is just an industry event (yeah right!).

Of course we have a microcosm in the Xblig area. Though all the devs know that visibility is still the key component in selling games, whether they be bad or not is less relevant. Having 10K downloads and selling just 5% is much better than 2K downloads and selling 20%. Of course i do believ something else...

Quality of presentation and gameplay, including music makes a better conversion rate.

This also includes crap games. It is possible to have a simple game that will do well because of it's presentation. I would offer up a particular Avatar game as evidence, but they have had plenty of press recently. The point is that it looks nice enough, the gameplay is ridiculously simple. Yet their conversion rate is high, and why not.

So what can Xbligs do to get the word out about their game? That is a good question and i have been working very very hard this year to try and get word out. I have failed, but i try. One recent group has apparently resorted to publicising their new application by ridiculing the Xblig community through Kotaku. this appears to be a brilliant move. Unfortuneatly i am not very good at that good cop bad cop and being the bad guy thing.

So far the only answer i have to the visibility is to have an Avatar in the title and game. so i will continue to play with them until i have a good game to put them in. I cannot just put them in for the sake of it, like a number of current Avatar games have.

Well thats all from me, Get a huge budget and maybe it will pay off, i have tried spending, but cannot seem to find the Xblig buyers.

Good luck to everyone else

G'night

UberGeekGames Avatar Wrapper

Having been playing with the Avatar stuff these last several days (i haven't had much time for my own work). I knew i needed to write a good surrounding class to put all the crap in, the stuf that needs to be done regardless, the messy stuff that should be easy and straight forward. But before i could get to that i would need something else.

The default animations for the Avatars are very nice. But apart from allowing a game to play Simon with them, i do not think there are many other uses. so i did a search to see if any kind soul had put out any other anims, namely i wanted a run animation. Well lo and behold Microsoft had an avatar animation pack. It took m a post in the forums to find it, but i did get it from the new app hub in the end. This pack supplies a bunch of stuff and a run anim is one of them, woohoo!

This however opened up a can of worms. Ya see, to get custom animations into the Xbox (yes, these new ones are counted as custom, cos they are not built in). ya have to go through some severe pain. Namely you have to have a content importer, and of course this means work, cos well. why would anyone wan tto put this into a real nice tidy simple to use wrapper? I mean, why bother. I know i should not complain, but it seems to be that they did the work to make this system, and then just stopped short on a few things that would make it so much tidier and nicer for new and old developers.

Anyway, this casued me some consternation and i figured i would not bother, until i also decided to search for an Avatar animation class, feeling like maybe someone had already done some of this work. And woah, there it was. Lying in wait for me at UberGeekGames was an avatar wrapper, and also some extra goodness.

The extra was in the form of they had made it so on the PC there were the bones of the Avatar displayed. This is big, as Avatars cannot actually be rendered on the PC, and as most Xblig devs do a high percentage of their work on the PC (like me), this should prove a real beneift. BONUS!!!

I have now integrated the wrapper class into my test application, with much trouble over the oddites of having to have two separate libs for the skinnedModel class. Once i was over these issues i can see the dudes rotating on my Xbox screen. funnily enough getting it working on the PC was real fast.

Thanks very much UGG, you folks rock, along with the other people that helped you give this to the community.

You can check out their Blog here.

G'night

Some web sites make me feel good

Here is a web site that decided to offer  something that everyone with an Xbox should be interested in.

I have to say i am very proud to be on that list.

LIST of Xblig Worth Checking out.

Apart from that i have to also mention that my job is currently kicking my Butt. I am working extremely hard trying to reverse engineer some combo binary data packets and then grab the vert data that is in them. I am even having trouble finding vert dtaa at all, never mind extracting it correctly. Now these are binaries created for a PS2 game, but geez, i usually handle this stuff no problem. Instead i feel weak and annoyed.

I certainly hope tomorrow goes better, as two weeks working on deciphering this is getting real old, fast!

G'night.

A shooter Update Now on Xbox

YAY! Thanks have to go to my Peers who got this minor update through in about 4 days or so.

Now there are a number of minor tweaks and fixes, the most obvious one being shooting the Purple Asteroid to retrieve your powerup from inside it. I hope this makes the frist several levels much more enjoyable for new players.

don't forget about the competition ending this Sunday evening, and you can check out my videos for playthru's of both level 5 and 9. although watching them will teach you how to also play the lower levels.

Good luck

Da Voodoochief

A Shooter Level 5 Playthru Video

I hope this helps those people that might be having issues on Level 5. Good luck and if ya practice, the kills and skills will come.



Good night.

What Next ?

Is anything next? at least for my lovely Xblig?

At the moment i think not. With only 2000 downloads it seems very few are interested in what i do. I will however do a post mortem as soon as i can. detailing decisions i made for the game that have ultimately stunted its spread.

g'night

Competition Event #2 Winner

Here is what i saw at 9pm pst tonight on my xbox.

A very definitive win for sure. Placed directly below my own new score and my artists score. I am very pleased to see someone win who has improved on last weeks score. This makes me happy people are improving at the game.

Well after all my internet and virus problems this weekend i have to call it a night. I look forward to sending off a T-shirt to Germany no less.

Don't forget that next weeks competition is in a wekks time.

Good luck and please pass on the competition info to anyone you know with an Xbox360.

G'night.

A Shooter Update and Competition

Is now in Peer Reveiw. Not bad being about a day late for me. Still i have not made that many changes, and the ones i have made are small ones. Though my testing cycle is very lengthy.

It should be stable and ready to go, i hope it goes through quickly and then players can appreciate how the powerup asteroid was supposed to function. I just wish i had noticed it, instead of accepting it. Hindsight eh!

So any Peers, i would love it if you can check out my Game and push it through asap.

At least this should free up my weekend a bit to actually playtest some games myself. I did get a few done this week, so that's a good thing. Still never gonna be able to do as many as i would like.

COMPETITION - WIN Win win

So I wonder who will Win this weeks Competiton. Event number #2 is now brewing and less than 48 hours left. Woohoo! I am quite excited, and currently Lohengrehn is sitting in 4th place on the leaderboard, behind My co-devfeloper and Myself, and of course last weeks winner. Will someone pass him up for the T-Shirt?

Laters

Top Mover, me?! (Xblig)

I noticed this a few days ago. I never thought i would make it onto this esteemed list in my life. I just don't have the time to commit enough of it to Peer reveiwing anything that goes. In fact i won't Pass stuff i don't like, and that holds back my score quite a lot. This score does have some importance though, and even to me it is a good marker to see if you are even bothered to review someones game or not.

Is my score as high as i would like it to be? Nope is the answer, and yes i can most definitely do something about it. But it will have to be when it feels right, not just to make a few more rep points.

I have been very busy with my competition this week and also monitoring all the stuff going on. I have f course been fixing a number of minor bugs that have surfaced since release as well. I expect to have a new version ready for Peer Review by thursday sometime. This new version will also address the purple asteroids hit point issue. Once again i say Bah!

Back to my Rep points for a moment and i have to say that i am proud to make it onto this list. Keep up the good work all you other dedicated people, i hope to return to this list soon.

G'night

A Dreamland Chronicles Game - Now Cheaper

The update for Dreamland is finally out. I sure hope this will increase sales by a large factor (like 3 or more!!). This game is now finally at the right price point for what i think it is. So maybe from those 500 downloads a week i can grab maybe 50 or more sales. I can hope!!

Along with Dreamland going live onto the marketplace last night A Shooter was of course placed into Peer review. So far a Good guy named Bob Taco Ind (ok, thats not his real name), has sent me an email after testing the game. He brought up several points about things he does not like. I will be posting on them tonight, after i have responded to his email in about an hour. Needless to say i am looking forward to the conversation, Bob Taco works hard on the Xblig channel and i have to say i am a bit of a fan of his. Not that i always agree with his stances on rules etc. But i do not have to agree with everyone on design points etc. That is what makes life more interesting. (this last bit is the point of this post really :)

Laters

A Day of Rest?

It is sunday, it was all day, and i am told it is a day of rest. I cannot honestly remember the last time i rested on any day, never mind if it was a sunday or not.

So this morning i started off by taking the family off roading. It went very well and i think everyones skills improved a bit today and we got through about 25 miles or so. I loved it, though it can make me a bit nervoud watching me kids do something for the first time, like scaling a steeper hill than they usually have a go at etc.

Later we managed to go shopping and eventually i ended up at home for a nap :) I managed to take about an hour and this pleased me greatly cos i was slated to play tome mixed doubles tennis at 8pm. Though that got cancelled at 7:50pm. Ahh well.

In the mean time of the afternoon and later evening as well as playing Wow with my friend and warcraft3 with my son. Who i recently inctroduced to the RTS genre i was thinking about what is next for A Shooter, or more pointedly, what do i need to do before it goes live. Not that it is likely to the first try, but ya never know. It was in peer review a lot of times and for long periods.

So the answer is simply Press Release. However my press release for this game must have some details about the competition i will be running when the game comes out. Hmm, i will think more on this and blog when i have more info i reckon.

G'night.