Day one, attempt one

It has been an hectic night/morning/day, what started as "I wonder how the XNA 4.0 tools are" ended up in an early version of a, what I assume is going to be a pretty bad (but more importantly, working!) game.

First of all, I want to start off by thanking this great site for providing all the help in getting me started. All the assets are also from that tutorial set.

In fact what you will see of this game as of now is 98% just those tutorials. I've made a couple of tweaks and added stuff here and there, also failing to add stuff here and there. But more on that later.

Let's just take a look at this game in it's current state:

So it's a wizard guy, shooting pretty fast fireballs. I will adjust movement and fire ball speed and so on to my satisfaction, once there is more objects to balance out.

You may have noticed he can also hide under his hat. I will make this a stealth part of the game. If in certain areas, enemies collide with you when you are not under your hat, an alarm will go off or your score will get a minus or whatever.

You may have also noticed that fireballs get smaller as they travel. This is a visual aid to let the player know that they get less powerful as they travel. So, standing back and sniping enemies, although still a viable option, is a weaker one. At least with the fireball.

Which leads me on to the next point: More projectiles. Thanks to the object oriented way the code is set-up, adding projectiles with unique behaviour is pretty simple and as game progresses, I will definitely add more. An obvious one would be one that contrasts the fireball (so it gets stronger as it travels).

Those are all 'to be done' based on what you've seen in the video, and are not things near the top of my to-do list (more on that at the end). Now, about those things I've tried to add but failed.
Well, there is only one so far: A menu system. You've seen it has a generic splash screen and a title screen, but no game menu. This has proved to be much harder than I've thought. I did get one running eventually but it was (as the guy who made the tutorial pointed out), a very basic one and for reasons I can't recall, it didn't fully meet my needs.
There is a great source code from Microsoft but unfortunately it's an ocean of code and after a long and tedious attempt, I've failed to implement it into my game fully. It is something I need to read more on, as I had no idea what half the things did in Microsoft's example code. Although I think I'm on the right line to learn more.


Neat things I've learnt:

• You know that 'press start' screen most games have. That's to initialise which controller player one is using. Maybe it was obvious to everyone, but it never clicked with me until I made that screen myself. I was under the impression the system passed it on to the game.
• Having used Silverlight, I was under the impression MS can't build a proper visual library. Of course, it turns out, they can when it's their focus, as XNA is very developer friendly for both PC and X360. I have also ran a even more basic code on the Windows7 Phone emulator, and that too, worked nice and easy. Kudos, Microsoft.

To do list!! In order of "me want it now!":

• Add a menu system for crying out loud!
• Get collision system working, starting with two things not going through each other and building from there, i.e: projectiles hurt you/ the enemy, test above stealth idea and so on.
• Once all that is working in current screen, learn to scroll screen with player. I can take the "easy" way out and just load a new screen when you run out of the current one, but I am going to try to have it properly scrolling with the player. Don't be surprised if I back out on this though, and go to switching static screens, and say it was a 'game design choice'.