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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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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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Tutorial: Panelling Effects on a Sprite

10:56 am on October 22, 2009 by Jackson Matthews

In this post I’m going to show you the stages I use to apply a ‘panelling’ effect on my machine sprites, to give the impression that a sprite has been constructed. These little details, such as raised and indented areas, can really bring an otherwise simple surface to life very fast.

Tools needed:

Photoshop

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XNA: The title-safe area and SDTVs

12:43 pm on October 19, 2009 by John Wordsworth

In this article we discuss the trials of working to the title-safe area in your own Independent XNA titles. We look at the problems that this can raise and possible solutions that you should consider right from the start of the project.

On face value, working to ensure that the contents of your console / XNA title fit may sound like a trivial task. However, we have learnt our lesson well, and after our first project – we have come to realise that it’s something that you have to consider right from the beginning. Not everyone has a 42 inch 1080p screen like you might, and making sure your game works across all types of displays can cause a real headache if left to the last minute. 

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Tutorial: Creating a Boss Sprite

10:21 pm on October 13, 2009 by Jackson Matthews

In this post I hope to take you through the basic stages of putting together the pieces for a boss sprite. Obviously everyone is going to have their own preferred technique, but here’s what I found worked best for me once I’d made a few already and had the process refined to a point I was happy with.

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