100 Experience Points
An Adventure in Indie Game Development

Day 26: 28 February 2013

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.

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The Proper Care and Feeding of Modders

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.

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Sprint #3 Review

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.

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Sprint 3 Retrospective

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.

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Day 23: 25 February 2013

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…

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Day 22: 24 February 2013

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.

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Basis Transformations

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.

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Day 20: 22 February 2013

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.)

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The Principle of Immedite Recognition

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:

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Day 19: 21 February 2013

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.

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Ship Building Q&A

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.

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Day 18: 20 February 2013

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…

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Another Week of Tutorials

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.

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MonoGame Getting Started Tutorials

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.)

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Day 15: 1 February 2013

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.)

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