Look out for us at Dundee Winter Night Light on November 27th.

YinYangYou, our game, is a top-down two-player race to collect energy and skew the balance of the playing field. By throwing orbs into their opponents’ “holes”, each player can increase the amount of ground they control on the opposite side of the board, eventually claiming an entire side and winning the game. A range of exotic energy pickups, such as time control and hole switiching, add variety and tactical elements to the gameplay.

Developed using XNA, our prototype includes all the features we originally planned – although that isn’t to say the week went without a hitch. Lengthy code merges, a lack of shared source control and model import problems were exacerbated by the fact that having just met, our communication levels were far from ideal. However, by remaining flexible and getting to know each team members strengths and weaknesses, our workflow improved hugely throughout the week.

Even though this project was really short, I feel I got a lot from it. Spending time in groups with the same people for the past year let us refine development and programming methods which worked very well for us. Suddenly being dropped into an entirely different group challenged some of my beliefs and ideas, and reaffirmed others. The opportunity to talk to industry mentors about this game and about development in general was also hugely beneficial.

Finally, I just want to say thanks to Iain Smith for organising the event, all the mentors and other participants for their help and to the rest of Team Be for making YinYangYou a success.

We pitched our games to the other participants on Friday, having only just managed to meet up the morning beforehand. Luckily we’d managed to agree on a game design through online meetings on Skype, but there were elements that we didn’t fully decide upon until we met face to face.

This morning (early this morning) we got together in Whitespace to actually start work. The team is composed of two programmers, two artists and an audio producer, and while we have roles and some idea of what we each need to achieve it’s hard to know exactly what we will end up with until we get to know each other better.

Waj, the other coder, and I settled into development over the weekend before by developing a particle system manager and a flexible 2D game framework respectively (we, of course, couldn’t start work on the game until today). Luckily, we have XNA at our disposal which should make a big difference to what we can get through in the timespan. Today however, much of each our time was spent simply merging code: lacking an SVN client on the university computers we were attempting to simply use Dropbox. Scary, and time consuming. Hopefully tomorrow we can make use a portable command line SVN client to keep track of changes.

Another issue we’re facing is in terms of work distribution and each having our own coding standards. As you might imagine, most of the problem is with communication – to a small extent because we don’t know each other, but mostly because we barely had time to come up with a game idea, let alone come up with task lists and naming schemes. We’re working things out the best we can as we go along though.

So, hopefully on friday we’ll have a simple top-down 2D game to share! Wish us luck.