Just a short video to demonstrate how the different bee types in the game are used together in the game, and give some idea of how your swarm is controlled. At this stage we’ve got our level blocked out and are working on adding art assets and refining each obstacle, making sure they play well and are… y’know… actually fun.
Dare Week 2
June 20th, 2009
So, it’s been 2 weeks since Dare to be Digital started and I’ve failed to write anything about it so far, so here’s an update.
Progress
The first two weeks of the competition have gone fairly smoothly. We’ve had problems with exporting models and animations and with collision responses, but no major issues that we haven’t worked past. So far we have the abilities for each of our bee types in place and working in our blocked out level. We’ve designed and redesigned the obstacles involved in the game and we’re happy with the basic progression of these so far, but obviously we’ll continue to change and refine them until we have a complete demo.
XNA, C# and Visual Studio
XNA is working very well for us, and we’re making far more progress than we expected. Compared to the OGRE engine which we worked with on our last project XNA has a lot of similarities – it’s very flexible and allows the developer to decide the extent to which they rely on built in functionality. However, XNA does have an advantage in terms of the amount of features available without relying on third party libraries and although content loading hasn’t been entirely painless, the design of XNA’s content pipeline is really nice.
We’re using our own systems for basic physics and collision detection, so the only external functionality we’re making use of is XNAnimation for skeletal animation and EasyConfig for config file loading. Both of these integrated incredibly easily with XNA and are working very well for us. While early on we did consider using IronPython for scripting support, simply loading values from config files is providing more than enough flexibility for us so far, and the format we’re working with has far less overhead than creating XML files.
Although none of the team had much C# experience before the start of Dare, it didn’t take long to get used to it. Obviously we don’t yet have the same level of understanding of the language as we did with C++, but for most functionality the two are similar enough that it isn’t an issue. The fact that Visual Studio 2008 practically writes the code for us is also helpful here…
Websites and all that
We’ve got some concept art and renders up on our page on the Dare website, where you can also check out the games other teams are working on. We also have a twitter feed, though mostly we just share pictures of bees.
Twittering
May 13th, 2009
Digital Colony, the Dare team I’m part of, has a twitter account. You can find us at http://twitter.com/Digital_Colony, so go ahead and follow us to keep up-to-date with what we’re doing over the summer.
You can also find the other teams by looking at who Dare to be Digital is following.
Also, I forgot that we took some dodgy looking photos when we were through in Glasgow for our interview.
Like I said, dodgy photos.
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Dare
April 29th, 2009
We got in!
So excited, I can’t wait for it to begin.
Waiting to hear back after the interview was nerve-wracking, though thankfully we were all told whether we’d be taking part before the official announcement was made. As for the interview itself, it went surprisingly well. I can’t speak for everyone, but I was terrified about having to speak, and about what horrible question we might be asked that we hadn’t even considered before. In reality though, the judges were all friendly and the setting for the interview was fairly informal, so we were all relaxed and our presentation went more smootly than in any of the practice runs. It left us feeling that whether or not we got in, it went as well as it could have and there wasn’t really anything we’d later be kicking ourselves over messing up, which I guess is the best outcome you can hope for.
As with in other years of the competition, we’ll have to update blogs and video diaries, so I’ll share a link to those as and when they start existing.
Anyway, before that I’ve still got some coursework to get through (not a huge amount though – it’s due on Friday after all).
I’ve finished my OpenGL coursework and I’m pretty happy with it – I’ll share some more details, code and the executable itself once I’ve handed it in. Conforming to the requests of UKR’s Blue Skies in Games Campaign I’ve made everything considerabley brighter and more cheerful. I also made some technical improvements as well, so that now the application actually runs at a decent framerate on hardware I can afford to test it on.
Dare
March 13th, 2009
With 2 days to go before the application deadline, I figured I’d mention the team I’m part of and our idea for Dare to be Digital. If accepted we’re hoping to make a Wii game where the player uses gestures to guide a swarm of bees through a series of puzzles to their new home. You can read (and, if you like it, vote for) our full idea.
Unfortunately the Dare to be Digital website doesn’t allow us to change the idea we’ve posted to react to feedback, but if you leave us criticism and suggestions either there or as a comment to this post, we will read it and take it on board.
Thanks for your support!