Moving On..

Life is good..

Well ok I guess it isn’t all the time but no matter how bad things might get, you always get those instances (however brief) that things start looking up to the point where you start to wonder “Hmmm.. Many things might turn out OK after all..”

Take these past few months for instance,
I’ve been busy as a beaver organizing my wedding, knocking out PSP code for the current project at work & more importantly doing quite a bit of XNA development.
So it came as icing on the cake when MS recently announced their plans to monetize their Community Games platform launching this holiday. I’d always dreamed of shipping a nice little polished game for people the world over to enjoy & now it seems that not only can a little dedication & hard work secure my dreams coming true, but they may also net me a bit of pocket money in the process..

In such an exciting time it only helped both motivate and accelerate my drive to get the two XNA projects i’m working on out the door. Also I figure now would be as good a time as any to post a little progress on one of them:-

solace engine menu test

It’s a test render of the early menu system for the game. The design is essentially a dial mechanism (apologies for the not-so-l337-programmer-art..) that rotates persistently & all the menu options are procedurally distributed as label links around the screen. So far it’s fully functional (complete with transitions & floaty, turny dynamics..) & adding new menu screens are as easy as creating a new menu overlay object & adding strings for each menu element.

On the other side of the development field..

After a bit of a long break, me & rich have been working rigorously to get SMC into a state where it’s playable & it’s really coming along now. We’ll be posted some new updates on houseofsmash soon so don’t forget to look out for updates in the coming days/weeks..

P.S.

After developing the current engine (which I’m using on both my current projects) for over a year now it’s really been an interested ride for me that’s helped me to learn alot. I’m looking forward to taking the platform from strength to strength as development progresses & I have alot of plans for what I would like to do with it even after I complete (or bust) the two current projects..

Stay tuned for more soon!

- The Hog