August 27th, 2009By jmitch18Categories: Programming, XNA
I’ve been doing 2D XNA for about a year and a half now and I feel I’m fairly competent at it, largely due to my experience in the Imagine Cup, so over this past week or so I’ve begun working on my first 3D XNA game. I’ve had the concept for the game in my head and been thinking it through quite a lot and now I feel I am ready to begin some of the core programming. Some time in the future I may give some more details about the project but as I am aiming to get it on the Xbox Live Indie Games, I feel like I should keep quiet for now until I get a substantial amount of work done!
I’ve found the 3D work so far quite enjoyable, I’ve encountered a few strange issues and differences that you wouldn’t come across in a 3D game but that’s all part of the learning curve. I’m putting into practice a lot of the lessons I have learnt from my placement at Microsoft already in terms of class design project structure and hope to create a robust game that I should be able to maintain easily.
I plan on updating this blog as I go along with something similar to a tutorial series and will hopefully be able to fill in some the gaps that are left by some of the “How to…” and “Introduction to…” tutorials.
For quite some time, I’d been wanting to get back into playing an MMORPG a little bit. The only thing that has kept me from it is having to pay a subscription to play. This would go one of two ways; one I would feel obliged to play every waking moment at the loss of a normal social life, or I would barely play and waste my money!
The round 2 results of the Imagine Cup were announced at 1:00am on 4th June 2009; the finalists can be seen on the Imagine Cup website. Unfortunately my team did not make it through to the finals in Cairo which was a little disappointing considering the amount of work I had put into the game. I hope to find out if I was in the top 20 teams sometime soon. Regardless of what the result is, I’m proud of what I’ve achieved and I’m very happy with my game. Hopefully I’ll be able to take the game forward and maybe get a bit of money for it. I would really love to be able to develop the game further and maybe even have my own games studio somewhere along the line? Its a good dream!
Just a quick post on a game I’m really excited about! This something I’ve wanted since I was knee-high. Here’s the trailer:
Update: Sony have bought the publishing rights to Ghostbusters in Europe meaning it will remain exclusive to their platforms until “later this year”. I’m hoping its a great game but I still find this to be a strange move. Atari said this move was to help it reach a wider audience on release; I can’t see how moving from a multi-platform European release to an exclusive European release could ever possibly make it reach a wider audience. Perhaps this is a move to try and get all the Xbox 360 and Wii owners to break out their old PS2’s and purchase the game?
Another update: I now have a copy of this game and I love it! Bustin’ makes me feel good!
My Imagine Cup team (Sandpit Ninjas) was invited to Microsoft in Dublin on 1st May 2009 to meet with a couple of their experts to help us out with ideas and suggestions for our round two submission for the Imagine Cup. I headed down to Dublin with Jonny Hughes, a member of the team, and Darryl Charles, the team mentor, to first meet up with Liam Cronin (Academic Engagement Manager) and David Gibson who later introduced us to Diego Columbo, Martha Rotter and an internship employee who competed in the Imagine Cup called Darren (I think).
Something I have played with for a little while is the idea of creating more complex session variables in PHP. I’m sure this kind of thing has been done before so this is probably nothing new to some people. The idea just came into my head a little while back and I decided to give it a go. Basically all I do is create a class and serialize it to a $_SESSION variable. Even though this article doesn’t execute any queries on the database, it could just as easily apply to such a situation resulting in the need to only query the database once for the data. Read on for some basic code.
For quite a while I have been itching to try out some iPhone/iPod Touch development. Being currently unable to afford a Mac of any form to try it out, I thought I would still be waiting however I was lucky enough to get to borrow a MacBook for a couple of days and give it a shot.
It’s well known that the Sony Playstation 3 lacks the range of exclusive games that other consoles have. I don’t really follow the PS3 very much and I’m not really up to date with its newest games either. I was quite surprised to read that Sony will fund exclusive games for the Playstation Network. To me, this seems very much like Sony are begging for a good range of exclusive games. With still no sign of a Playstation 3 price cut and falling sales figures (according to NPD) I think Sony really needs to make a move soon; the Xbox Live Arcade is only getting bigger, and lets not forget that the Wii is selling incredibly well (despite an insanely crap library of games).
On a side note, I still can’t believe how naive people can be regarding the Wii. Kaz Hirai (Sony Computer Entertainment boss) says that they “don’t look at [Nintendo's] console as being a competitor”. Maybe its the Sony attitude to the other competition in the industry that’s keeping them down?
March 27th, 2009By jmitch18Categories: Imagine Cup
The results of round 1 of the Imagine Cup were announced on Friday 20th March. I was delighted to discover that my team had progressed to round 2. So now its time for the work to begin!
Yesterday we had a bit of a discussion with Darryl Charles, the team mentor, about what we could do for the second round of the competition. Some very interesting ideas were brought up about profiling player statistics throughout the game. This is definately an idea I’m quite interested in! There was also a suggestion of an awards system for the game (since we can’t actually work with proper achievements) which again is another thing I’m interesting in adding to the game.
However, there are still some holes in our plan for this round. We want to add extra game modes to the game by varying the challenges presented; much in the same way Geometry Wars 2 accomplishes its extra game modes. Unfortunately my mind is currently void of potential ideas, maybe its too clouded with dreams of a paid trip to Cairo?
For quite a while now, I have had a keen interest in ASP.NET. I’ve done a couple of really small sites as a way of getting to grips with it. First was a site that was mainly just static with a built in contact form to send an email, simple stuff. My next “learning project” was a really basic blog engine that was intended to be used on jason-mitchell.com but in the end, I felt there was too much learning involved alongside my work for university and the Imagine Cup. I decided to go ahead and set up a trust WordPress blog and put my ASP.NET blog engine on a back burner for the time being.
I'm a third year student at the University of Ulster, Coleraine studying Computing with Digital Games Development. I'm currently on my placement at Microsoft as a Software Development Engineer.
