My first XNA game is complete! It's not perfect and shiny, but I'm happy I've taken it as far I wanted too. Here is a quick video I've put together of a play-through.
You can see your character, the little yellow man tumble down into a well. He needs to escape and raise his yellow victory flag. Suddenly tetriminos start falling from the sky. He has to avoid them and constantly jump and climb to stay on top and not be crushed to death. Eventually, he jumps out of the well only to find an old foe waiting for him on the hill...
Three areas I know I can improve are:
Sound. I haven’t added any sound effects or background music at all. From the developer's point of view it turns out to be very similar to the sprite images. I'm sure they would be easy enough to add in at a later date if I wanted to.
Everyone I have shown the game to raises the same point. They all think it should be two player; the falling tetriminos controlled by the extra player. This is slightly devastating for me, as writing a semi-believable AI for the tetriminos was the single most time consuming part. Maybe I should pay attention to other people's opinions sooner rather than later? Oh well.
There is a strange bug which happens sometimes when a row is deleted. The yellow man will start floating in the air as if that row still existed. Lucky for me this is not a published product so I don't have to get to the bottom of this one. I wasn't trying to achieve a polished result so I'm happy to leave that bug in as a talking point.
So far my experiences with XNA have been nothing but fun. I'm often surprised that when you ask around what other developers are working on in their spare time, it is often websites and other little libraries which are not all that dissimilar from their day jobs. There is so much more that people could be working on and I'm not sure why more people don't do this. Or maybe they do and I'm just not hearing about it?
I'm interested to look around at what third party libraries are available to open more doors. So far I have stuck to only using the framework classes to see what was really going on. At some point soon I'll have to make the leap into 3D gaming. XNA looks to have great support for that, but I just wonder if it will be as easy to get started, or if there is a massive step-up? I shall keep you posted.
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