I’ve just ported this site from a WordPress site, hosted by GoDaddy to a Jekyll-based statically generated site, hosted through GitHub Pages. I’ve got to say it was not a trivial job, but I like the new scheme better. It makes the management side a bit easier to handle without making the content editing much harder, plus I get much better security and more control over my own data.
Continue Reading →I know at this point, it is kind of short notice, and I also know that many of you here probably are already aware of this, but I wanted to announce that we’ve organized a month-long game development challenge on my Wikidot site. It has the loose theme of Space Invaders, but if you want to join us and do a different game, we’d still love to have you!
Continue Reading →I frequently get emails from people asking me what direction they should take in the future, whether it should be Unity, XNA/MonoGame, or something else. That’s not a question I can answer directly because it depends.
Continue Reading →A few weeks ago, I got a couple of emails from two different people, both of them pointing me in the direction of some steps that would get XNA installed in Visual Studio 2012 or 2013. I should mention that in the past, I’ve followed directions like this without success. I had one time where I spent about 10 hours total mucking around with configuration files and never had anything happen, and another time where I got the XNA extension loaded, but the content project just didn’t work at all. So I’ve just been staying with Visual Studio 2010 for XNA development (while using 2012 and now 2013 for other development).
Continue Reading →I ran into this problem today while trying to do some transparency shader stuff. I run the program (which compiles without error and starts running just fine) and set some breakpoints. But the breakpoints turn from red to white with a red outline, with a warning message that says:
Continue Reading →This is my first of two posts about what happens here now, after being away for so many months. Today, I’m going to talk about what happens with the game. Later, I’ll talk about what happens with this website.
Continue Reading →It has been well over four months since my last update. That is not what was supposed to happen with this. I was supposed to spend the last few days finishing my game. Wrapping up the 100 days. It didn’t happen.
Continue Reading →After months of silence, this blog finally came back to life a few days ago. I promised then that I’d get around to answering some questions about what happened. That’s what this post is going to be about.
Continue Reading →I’m getting this out quite a bit later in the day than I had anticipated, but here’s the list of entries. (I’ll extend the time period for comments and equal amount of time.) All of these are open for comment. Don’t feel like you need to comment on every single one or anything. If one stands out to you, say so. If you can see a potential problem with a name that I’m not thinking of, say so. If you just have a comment about selecting a name in general, go ahead and leave a comment.
Continue Reading →I got an email from somebody a couple of weeks ago, telling me I should consider asking you guys for potential names for the game. I should have done it weeks ago, but today, I’m announcing that I’m starting a mini-competition for my game’s name. The winning entry gets their name in a “Special Thanks” section of the (yet-to-be-made) credits.
Continue Reading →New update again. Here’s the link if you’re not getting the automatic updates already: http://100ExperiencePoints.com/daily/100XP-Setup.exe.
Continue Reading →Shields are up and running now. Enjoy!
Continue Reading →I apologize for what I’m about to do to you, but I’m going to give you a build that is sort of half complete. Tonight I’ve been working on shield generators for the game. One of my biggest priorities right now is to bring the damage engine in line with what I expect it to do. It may take a few more days.
Continue Reading →Prepare to be amazed.
Continue Reading →The first rule of Optimization Club is that you don’t optimize.
Continue Reading →I’ll keep it short tonight, because I’m tired, but I just put out a new update. (Download link if you’re new here: http://100experiencepoints.com/daily/100XP-Setup.exe.)
Continue Reading →It’s been another really good day. Somehow, I’ve been finding plenty of time (and motivation) to work on this game, and it has been progressing really well lately.
Continue Reading →First off, there’s a new update to the game. If you’ve already got it, just running the game should update it. If you’re new here, here’s the download link: http://100ExperiencePoints.com/daily/100XP-Setup.exe
Continue Reading →Sorry for the lack of posts. There just hasn’t been much worth talking about over the weekend. Until today.
Continue Reading →For the first day in a very long time, I felt like I made significant progress. And along multiple fronts too. As I write these words, a new update is being deployed to the server. Again, for those of you who are just joining us, the URL for the “daily” downloads is http://100ExperiencePoints.com/daily/100XP-Setup.exe.
Continue Reading →I spent the day working on getting these new hulls up and running. It’s mostly working, but there are a few bugs that I need to get worked out still before I put out a new release. But just to give you guys some eye candy:
Continue Reading →I’ve got all of the new ship bases assembled now, I just need to make it so that when you have no ship started, your only choices are the bases. It’s also pretty likely that I’ll want to make sure that if a piece is a base, you can’t attach it. At least for now.
Continue Reading →No new releases today. I did that twice already.
Continue Reading →So I’m writing this on the 29th. I was all prepared to post last night, but when I went to do it, my Internet was not behaving very well. I couldn’t get the site loaded. So I gave up.
Continue Reading →9:36: It feels good to be back into making my game again. The rest over the last few days, and not always having to worry about constantly going, was very nice, but I’ve missed the game development.
Continue Reading →Sorry for the complete lack of updates over the last week or two.
Continue Reading →Where do the days go? Honestly?
Continue Reading →It was another long day at work, so I don’t have a whole ton to show for tonight. But I think I finally fixed a bug that has made it so that some of you international followers have been unable to play the game for at least a month now.
Continue Reading →I finally finished the automated build stuff that I started on a while ago. One thing that is different is that the deployment is a ClickOnce application, instead of a .ccgame file. This means you no longer need XNA installed, and you don’t need Visual Studio. Anyone and everyone could download the game. All necessary prerequisites should be pulled down on their own.
Continue Reading →I skipped a day (yesterday) somehow, but I don’t think I’m going to go back and fill it in. That’s mostly because what I was working on yesterday and today is the same thing. So today’s update covers two days’ worth of work.
Continue Reading →I’m writing this at the end of a long day of programming. I feel like I did a lot today, but when I look at the game, it doesn’t seem like all that much changed. I essentially completely revamped the way weapons work. They now function with a time-to-live, whereas before, they disappeared when they reached a certain target. The new way really opens up a lot more possibilities, and will just flat out work better in terms of collisions/intersections.
Continue Reading →Here I am again, at the end of a sprint. I wanted to put out a quick update, along with a new end-of-sprint build for you guys.
Continue Reading →Your game requires a human heart. Your heart.
Continue Reading →This is being written on the 6th of April. I didn’t work on my game at all yesterday. Fridays are usually pretty tough. As I’ve mentioned, many Fridays, I’m driving two hours, half way across the state. By the time work is over, and by the time the drive is over, I’m often pretty tired. This was one of those days where I didn’t have much time or energy, and so nothing happened.
Continue Reading →I sat around this evening, knowing that I only had about a half hour to work on my game. I wanted to find something that I could complete in a short amount of time, and struggled for a couple of minutes to do so.
Continue Reading →It looks like I got the wrong date yesterday. It was a little after midnight when I posted, and when I went to check that date, I thought it was the 3rd. (It technically was, but Day 59 was 2 April, not 3 April.)
Continue Reading →First thing’s first. A quick explanation of what happened over the last few days. Basically, I wasn’t posting because I’m a human, and life happens.
Continue Reading →I wanted to put up some information here about where I’ve been the last few days, but it will have to wait. It’s already incredibly late. (Nothing really earth-shattering. Just normal stuff, really.)
Continue Reading →Over the weekend, I put out a new end-of-sprint release of my game. One key feature this included was that the game now saves your fleet between sessions. This is a really big deal, because now, for the first time ever, you can start building fleets that you’ll carry with you forever.
Continue Reading →I’ve got some real information populating the infocards now. You should see things like your ship’s health and what it’s trying to do. There’s definitely some cleanup that needs to be done still, but I thought it would be worth a new daily build anyway. (After all, you guys who are downloading the daily builds know that it’s not intended to be functioning correctly, necessarily.)
Continue Reading →If you read my last post, you probably already know what I spent my evening on. Trying to get some things sorted out with where to save files at.
Continue Reading →Here’s the end-of-sprint release for your entertainment pleasure: http://rbwhitaker.wikidot.com/local–files/sprint-review/100XP-24March2013.ccgame
Continue Reading →11:42: I’ve been hard at work this evening building a framework for the infocards. These are the little things that will pop up when you hover over a ship or a part on a ship, and display the object’s details. This was something that was outlined in detail when I originally made my mockups.
Continue Reading →8:35: Here we are, the day before the midway point. I had seriously hoped to be much further along with my game than I am.
Continue Reading →22:58: Once again, I’d like to write more than I’m probably going to. Like I had hoped, I was able to get the modal dialog box up and running. New screenshots, and new daily build.
Continue Reading →Whoa… it’s a zombie day. I’m really tired tonight. I think I’m going to sleep.
Continue Reading →20:35: It seems like I’m getting started a little earlier than I have for the last few days. Good. Hopefully that means getting a bit more done today.
Continue Reading →21:11: It feels like another fairly late day, but I think there’s enough time to get some interesting things accomplished. Starting with getting ship parts to quit floating in the Fleet Command screen. I actually know what’s causing this (the way they’re attached in the Shipyard screen) and I think it will be fairly easy to address.
Continue Reading →23:52: It seems like my schedule was really messed up today. Lots of other things going on. But I really wanted to do a bit of game programming, so I pulled myself away from what I was doing at about 22:30 (I should have been sleeping…) to try to get something done.
Continue Reading →11:54: So I got up in the morning, all ready to program, but after only a few minutes, I realized that I was still way too tired to function well enough to write code. Or at least, code that did something useful. So I went back to sleep. Next thing I knew, it was 11:30. Now on to game making.
Continue Reading →I’m not going to write much tonight. I’ve spent a couple of hours tonight getting into some file saving and loading code. The saving works as expected, the loading, not so much. I’ve got it to the point where I can persist a ship’s name and hull number, but not any of the actual hull parts. Which is kind of the important part. It writes it all out, but it just doesn’t read it in.
Continue Reading →We’re already into the 40s! That’s crazy! On day 50, it will be the end of this sprint. I’m really hoping to have a basic, working, “complete” version of my game by then. If I don’t, then whether I can get something put together in the 100 days would probably be in serious doubt.
Continue Reading →23:01: I got two big things completed today. One is the right side ship details panel. It’s pretty cool to see your ship’s stats changing as you add things to it. The second one, as I said yesterday, is the implementation of text boxes. That way, you can type in your ship’s name and hull number. There are potentially an infinite number of other places that the text box can be used in a game like this, too.
Continue Reading →23:24: I’ve done a couple of smallish things today. I added in the weapon type to a weapon’s properties and made it so you could hover over the items in the module/ship part library. That’s pretty convenient. I also tweaked the color of the little progress bars, but most people won’t notice that.
Continue Reading →22:55: I just spent the last couple of hours working on getting the part of the display that shows details about the selected ship part to work. I’m actually pretty impressed with (a) how it looks and (b) that it turned out to be relatively easy to put together. Nice work on that GUI framework, RB!
Continue Reading →Here it is, a new release of the game!
Continue Reading →This sprint was so weird, I don’t even know where to begin.
Continue Reading →A few weeks back, somebody made a comment about being interested in seeing the class diagrams for some specific, complicated piece of the game. My response was that I’m following Scrum, which de-emphasizes design documents like formal UML, and emphasizes working code instead. That’s not to say that there’s no place for UML in Scrum. Sometimes there is.
Continue Reading →In response to my post yesterday with the mockups, I got some really good questions from somebody who has been closely following the development of this game. (I’ll leave out names, in case they don’t want to really be identified.)
Continue Reading →Holy cow. I didn’t realize I had written so much on this blog today. How’d that happen? It’s like I wrote the entire works of Shakespeare. Or at least a novella or something.
Continue Reading →9:01: Considering how late I was up last night (about 3) I’m a little surprised I’m sitting here. But as soon as I woke up the first time, my brain began racing, and it was impossible to go back to sleep. There’s a chance I’ll crash in the afternoon, and need to go take a nap. Geez. That sounds like something an old person would do. Or a little kid. Whatever.
Continue Reading →19:45: Here it is now, in the evening of an attempted reboot of my game.
Continue Reading →One of the hardest things you’ll face when making your game is deciding what you’re going to do. And what you’re not going to do.
Continue Reading →Once again, I have little to show for today (besides my previous blog post), but that’s because I’ve been doing some longer term planning and designing today, in preparation for this coming weekend.
Continue Reading →21:32: I’ve been spending all of this time doing the art side of things and being frustrated, as you can tell from my last few posts.
Continue Reading →Again, sorry for a short post. I actually spent very little of my time on my game today. There were a lot of other things going on today. (It’s a part of life, right?) I began outlining a possible path forward with my ship appearance stuff that I think could work. I should get a chance to try it out tomorrow, and whether it works or not, I’ll give you a quick glimpse into that possibility.
Continue Reading →Nobody told me about the emotional roller coaster. Though I wish they had.
Continue Reading →23:01: I don’t have much to write tonight. I’ve actually been working on trying to see what I can do to make my 3D models look nice, but this is going to take some time. It’s probably not good to spend so much time on something I already know I’m not that great at when the last couple of days have already been bumpy.
Continue Reading →6:42: It’s the final day of the sprint. Sundays usually mean getting less done than Saturdays, but that’s fine by me. I’ve already completed everything I planned on doing this week plus a lot more.
Continue Reading →This is part 2 in a series on unit testing your game. Part 1 can be found here.
Continue Reading →7:16: Another weekend! Saturdays are usually the days I get the most done. But first and foremost on my list is to clean up the tasks that are remaining in my sprint backlog. That’s writing a post about what to focus on when unit testing, and make the battle/combat prototype more compelling. The interesting thing is, it used to have an enemy destroyer that you could blow up. I want to go back to that. It should be really easy to do, since it was there once. I just want people who download it tomorrow to be able to get the teeniest tiniest feel for what it is like. Both of those should be extremely easy to do, and here’s to hoping that they’re both done by 8:00.
Continue Reading →I have all of these things that I’d really like to get videos of on this blog. Some things just work better in video form, instead of image form.
Continue Reading →6:27: First, I reach the 25% mark, then it turns into March? What’s going on here?! The hourglass would appear to have too wide of an opening, and all of the sand is just dumping through to the bottom. I don’t get it. Where’s my pause button?
Continue Reading →8:12: It’s strange to think now that I’m 25% of the way done with this little experiment. And despite recent successes, it’s hard to not feel very overwhelmed. But… I’m trying to have a positive attitude. The game has come a long way as well. I just have serious doubts as to whether I’ll even come close to what I was originally aiming for. Maybe it’s time to start thinking of simpler versions of this that are more accomplishable. I don’t know.
Continue Reading →How does this happen? At the end of today, I’ll be 1/4 of the way done.
Continue Reading →In the somewhat off chance that you don’t know what a modder or a mod is, a modder is a person who makes mods, and a mod is a custom user-made tweak to your game, usually in the form of changes to art assets (often loading their own) and configuration settings. It comes from the world modify.
Continue Reading →It’s time for a rare morning coding session.
Continue Reading →In light of the fact that that I’m following Scrum, I should be having sprint review meetings. The purpose of these meetings in the “normal” world would be to show the current state of development to the product owner and perhaps anyone else that’s peripherally involved and has a stake in the project (the product owner team) like potential users.
Continue Reading →It’s time for another retrospective. I haven’t done one in what seems like weeks, but as anyone who’s been reading this can see, things were pretty disrupted for a while there. In the mean time, I completed a Sprint #2 in there, somewhere/somehow, and never managed to write a retrospective for it. But here’s the third (second?) installment of my sprint retrospectives.
Continue Reading →Welcome to Sprint #4! In this sprint, I’ll be doing some cleanup of the battle screen, and hopefully a lot more useful features in the shipyard. Now… where to start…
Continue Reading →So, if you’re using Google Reader (or probably any other RSS reader as well) to keep up with this blog, there’s something you should know.
Continue Reading →9:07: After all of that math yesterday, I think I’m in the mood for some art. I think I’m going to start by trying to make my combat engine look a little nicer, starting with maybe a skybox, and some improvements to what the grid looks like. The blue lines just aren’t cutting it for me right now.
Continue Reading →So all day, I’ve been trying to get all of my transformations for my game working correctly. One of the big key things, that I believe I just got up and running, is building a transformation matrix from one basis to another. I thought it would be worth posting that work here. This post kind of combines together a whole slew of ideas that I’ve needed to combine together to get my transformations working, but here it is anyway.
Continue Reading →7:58: I’m hoping to get lots done today and this weekend. Like I said yesterday, suddenly seeing a ‘2’ in the day number is a little scary.
Continue Reading →21:02: Day 20. At the end of today, I’ll be 1/5 of the way done. That thought makes me pretty nervous…. I’d better get serious about this game this weekend. (I was going to be anyway.)
Continue Reading →Let’s play a game. Take a look at the three images below, from the game Mass Effect. If you’ve played Mass Effect before, pretend you haven’t. I’m going to ask you a few questions and see if you get them right, even without ever playing the game:
Continue Reading →20:52: Here we are, ready for another exciting day. I want to try to do some more cleanup of my shipyard. My goals for today are to draw the piece you’re about to attach in kind of a transparent state, handle mirroring of objects (at the moment, I’ll assume you always want to mirror the ship, even though that’s not always the case) and drop in a second type of object to attach. Just to mix things up.
Continue Reading →Windwalker asked a whole pile of questions in the comments to yesterday’s post, and I think they’re interesting enough to discuss in a full blog post. So here it is.
Continue Reading →21:35: As you can see, so far today, I’ve been distracted with a couple of other posts. I think they were worth the time. Now I’m off to do some game programming, at least for a little while. It’s starting to get late…
Continue Reading →20:48: Let me start off the day by saying I spent part of my time updating the navigation on my tutorial website, specifically in the C# tutorials.
Continue Reading →20:48: Let me start off the day by saying I spent part of my time updating the navigation on my tutorial website, specifically in the C# tutorials.
Continue Reading →In case you haven’t guessed yet, I decided to take one more week to make more MonoGame tutorials before getting back to my game. I’m actually starting to get really antsy to get back to it. After dealing with a whole pile of frustration with MonoGame and SharpDX, I’m really looking forward to getting back to a tool that actually works like it’s supposed to.
Continue Reading →5 Yard Penalty.
Continue Reading →Yesterday, I posted about how XNA was being retired. The challenge, then, for those of us who use XNA is to find an alternative that isn’t being retired. This analysis is my take on what many people are suggesting is the right path: C++/DirectX. (I even mentioned this alternative in my original post.)
Continue Reading →As promised, I have more updates about the future of XNA and my website. I’ve just spent most of the day adding several new tutorials to my website. (Yes, instead of working on my game. I’m not sure quite yet how to count today in the 100 days. After all, I’ve given up a Saturday for this now, which is my best day to get stuff done.)
Continue Reading →If you haven’t done anything with MonoGame yet, and you’re thinking about trying it, you should go do that right now instead of reading this. I don’t want my opinion to sway you too much. Mostly because then I want you to come back and tell me what you thought about it.
Continue Reading →Continue Reading →
I wanted to do more development today, but something big (and problematic) came up that I’ve got to address right away. More on this very soon. (But it’s not good news.)
Continue Reading →If you’re making a game (or any other project/product) in your spare time, while working full time, you don’t have time to do everything you used to. Something has got to give.
Continue Reading →I meant to do this back on Sunday night or Monday (so technically more than a week ago) but never got around to it. Retrospectives are a key part of Scrum, and continually improving, so I think I’d better not skip it. In some ways, these retrospectives may be of more use to people than most of the other things on here.
Continue Reading →20:18: I know. I said I wasn’t going to do minute-by-minute updates. I’m just really excited to be back to doing some programming on my game for the first time in over a week. Hmm… now what to tackle first?
Continue Reading →Well, I’ve finally done it. I’ve got my website online.
Continue Reading →Sorry for the delays, guys!
Continue Reading →Today was the best weekday I’ve had so far. I didn’t do my sprint retrospective yet, but I did do my sprint planning. Then I got the camera movement working in the shipyard, plus I finally got back to making the grid work better. I still have a little more to go, but I didn’t have the frustrations with it that I had before.
Continue Reading →I wanted to get my next sprint set up today, but it’s going to have to wait. I had a person ask me in an email about what I thought the future of XNA was. I’ve actually had a lot of people ask that, and I wanted to do it justice. So today, instead of working on my game, I wrote up about 10 pages about what my thoughts were about that. I was going to post that here tonight, but I felt like I really needed to let it all sink in overnight. Hopefully, I’ll be able to post it tomorrow. And hopefully, I’ll be able to get my second sprint up and running tomorrow. And hopefully, I’ll be able to actually get my site online for the world tomorrow. So much still to do… and I’ve only got 89 days left.
Continue Reading →I’m feeling quite a bit better today. I’m looking at everything I’ve still got on my sprint, and I seriously doubt I’ll get done with all of it. There’s just too much to do still. But I’m finally back to feeling good and excited about this game. Getting some wins yesterday made a huge difference, and I’m almost done slogging through the refactoring that I need to do to have multiple screens in my game.
Continue Reading →I intend on putting together some information here about why unit testing is helpful, when to do it, and how to do it (at least, how I’m doing it in my XNA game).
Continue Reading →It’s now Saturday morning. My frustrations have been growing since about Wednesday, though I’m in a slightly better mood this morning than I have been for a while.
Continue Reading →10:28: In my previous post, I had said I needed to get a quick win. I got a win. It wasn’t as quick as I had hoped, but I got it. I wrote code to do plane/ray intersections. The code was easy enough (I’ve written very similar code before) but the hardest part was getting my unit tests up and running. I’m a little ashamed to admit that I wrote my first unit test on Day 9. It’s important to do.
Continue Reading →I’m tired. I don’t think I’m going to do anything today. Definitely not for the next couple of hours. If I don’t really get back to this until tomorrow, I’m not overly concerned. I intentionally planned on having at least a few days during the 100 days that I could just take off. It was part of the reason I chose 100 days instead of 3 months.
Continue Reading →Once again, I thought I could get this grid thing finished up today, but here it is now at the end of the day, and it’s still not finished. It looks awesome, but it’s not finished.
Continue Reading →As I was falling asleep last night, and all day today, I keep thinking about how things are going so far. I’m really frustrated. This is the first time during this experiment that I’ve been frustrated like this.
Continue Reading →Here’s an interesting little dilemma that I ran into today, as I was just randomly thinking about my game.
Continue Reading →21:40: I was at work until way late today. But sometimes, that’s just life. Unfortunately, that cuts into my time to work on this stuff.
Continue Reading →I keep asking myself why I’m doing this. I guess when I’m honest with myself, the reason why I’m doing this is just because.
Continue Reading →8:17: I’m back, once again. Yesterday, I tackled some stuff behind the scenes. Today, I’m hoping to make some progress on cleaning up a few loose ends with my combat prototype. Today, I’ll see differences in the actual game.
Continue Reading →I’m now done with Week 0. My little weekend experiment. It’s probably time for a little bit of a retrospective….
Continue Reading →I’ve been spending the last little bit of my weekend creating a utility class or two that will give me event driven mouse and keyboard events, as opposed to the default polling mechanism in XNA. I thought it would be worth taking a little time to outline what these two models are, what their advantages and disadvantages are, and how to make event driven events in XNA.
Continue Reading →Today is going to be an interesting day. This is the first day where I’m back in the real world. That means I don’t get to spend 6 or 8 hours on my game. I get 1 or 2 if I’m lucky. This is where a lot of people give up. There’s not enough time in the day to do everything.
Continue Reading →A lot of times you’ll hear people say, “It’s not a sprint; it’s a marathon.” Meaning you’re not trying to go as fast as you can for a short amount of time, you’re trying to maintain a decent speed for a very long time. I suspect that analogy is mostly representative of what I’m doing here.
Continue Reading →7:52: I’m back for Round 3! I just wrote up my earlier post about it not being a sprint or a marathon, but a relay.
Continue Reading →Right from Day 1, you’ve probably seen my talk about Pomodoro. The Pomodoro Technique is a really simple concept to help you manage your time.
Continue Reading →I’ve completed one day (only three hours) and I’m about to jump into Day 2. I thought it would be a good idea to reflect on where I am at this point in time.
Continue Reading →10:22: I’ve been at it for another half hour now. I’m working on figuring out how to get ships to move to a particular location. This, of course, is one of the key building blocks to a space RTS game. It will be necessary to be able to do waypoint navigation as well as being a key part of moving to attack something.
Continue Reading →Here I am. I’ve finished a full day of work and drove across the state in a big snow storm to get home.
Continue Reading →I’m sitting here the night before my big plan begins. It’s Game Dev Eve.
Continue Reading →