Three Years Later...

I'm still occasionally (passively) dropping links to this site (in forum signatures in a few places), so I figured I'd write a short post to explain why there haven't been any posts.

XNA Game Studio Connect

or, "How Not to Design your User Interfaces, Episode 84."

Managing State

Managing state in an application always presents opportunities for both brilliant and horrible designs.

Artificial Unintelligence

Some time ago I came up with abstracting the control of a tank with an interface called a TankPilot.  Classes that implement TankPilot are able to control a tank, whether by reading real input from a player, or by programmatically making decisions.  Up til recently, I'd only created the HumanTankPilot implementation.

Last night, on a whim, I decided to create BlindComputerPilot.  It's exactly as smart as it sounds: BlindComputerPilot drives in a straight line until he runs into something, then pivots in place for a random amount of time before driving in a straight line again.  At other random intervals, he pivots having not run into anything, and at other intervals he fires a shot.  Really simple stuff, but fun to watch!

In the Arena Designer area of the game, I've started putting together load/save behavior.  Pretty soon I'll have to come up with a UI for choosing an arena. 

Any graphic designers out there want to lend some visual creativity?

Easy Chair

I am now the proud owner of a La-Z-Boy rocker-recliner.  As I've mentioned in at least one earlier post, I find a recliner to be a very comfortable place for laptop-based developing.  And, I've finally set foot back in Let's Get TANKED! developer land.  This past weekend I solved a very basic problem with my arena designer segment, and started work on actually making it functional.  I can now create and position square "buildings" in my arenas.  Next stop is resizing the buildings and the arena itself, followed by choosing textures and their scaling.

Progress!  It feels good.  So does my recliner!

Well, Well, Well.

Look who's writing another post.  That's right, it's me!

This past weekend I took my xbox (turns out I only needed to take the hard drive, but whatever) to a friend's house and demoed Let's Get Tanked!.  I got some important feedback, and more importantly, we had fun playing it together.

So that has sort of encouraged me to think about maybe getting back in the saddle again and working on the game and getting it out the door.

Anybody out there good with 2D graphics and willing to work for possibly-free (i.e. I can only pay you if the game makes money)?

...and this new interface sucks, too!

Once again I find myself slacking off on the Let's Get TANKED! project.  Mainly because I'm lazy, but also because hey, I bought a house a few months ago!  Home-ownership is full of new responsibilities and new things to take up my time (especially given my inventive bent--lots of projects I want to accomplish now).

Anyway, hopefully later this summer I'll buckle down and get some development done.  Maybe take a vacation from my paying job and work on it.

I won't say "stay tuned"... but do flip back to my channel now and then.