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Game Programming and Design Blog

2009 November

5 things to avoid in XNA/Indie games

3:49 pm on November 19, 2009 by Jackson Matthews

In this post I’m going to talk about five of the things I have a powerful dislike for in commercial games. Of course, needless to say, this is just my opinion, but these are the things that I’d like to see a lot less of in games in general.

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Sentinel Development Diary 2 / Getting Game on Screen

9:41 am on by John Wordsworth

With the overall menus in place and a solid roadmap of the development ahead of us, the second proper session of development on our latest XNA title Sentinel sees the addition of the main game screen and the player entities. I’m going to talk about some of things that we did on this day, and the differences we made between this game and Ikaroids.

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A Note About Game Difficulty in XNA Games

10:16 am on November 17, 2009 by John Wordsworth

After the second round of playtesting for Ikaroids, we found that a number of comments were coming back to us stating that the game was rather difficult. Instead of simply dumbing down the game, we added the classic Easy, Medium and Hard difficulty settings to the game. Here’s some discussion about how we did that, and how to pre-empt the playtesters comments!

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Planning Code for Game Development (XNA)

11:41 pm on November 12, 2009 by John Wordsworth

There is nothing more detrimental to quick progress than poor planning. We’ve all had times when partaking in a project where we get confused and lost, or we’re coding away without any real purpose. I find this often simply comes down to not really knowing what the final goal of a class, project or function really is. If we can sit back, look at an overview and understand just what it is that we’re aiming for – a lot of coding becomes plugging in the gaps. I’m going to show you the general programming overview of Ikaroids to help you plan your project. You may develop your game in a completely different way – and this way is neither perfect or the definitive way to do it, this is just an example of how we did it to give you some ideas.

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Ikaroids – Game Level Design

12:42 pm on November 3, 2009 by Jackson Matthews

It’s worth remembering that while graphics can look pretty, it’s important not to let them dominate at the expense of other crucial elements. In this post I’m going to talk about the process of level design in the context of Ikaroids, including topics such as pacing, spacing of elements, and general look, feel and theme.

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