Concept, core gameplay mechanics, story, characters, and 40% of the boss and level design are done on paper.

There's still so much to do: menu screen, multiple levels, enemy design and program, scripted events, and audio.

Basically the only thing we have programmed is the basic gameplay mechanics in a single room.

This is a looooooooot more difficult than I anticipated, although the learning is an incredible reward. It's just me and a buddy putting this together, and we have a month left. We are making a 2d platformer a la Castlevania, Bangai-o, Metroid, Cave Story, and although it is simple, it's so much. Although it is daunting, I anticipate that we will have a sizable demo available for the submission deadline.

Good luck to you all!

I've got core gameplay done on Windows, and most of the shell together on the 360. At some point, these two will need to merge. The level format needs to be altered to account for widescreen format.

Once that's done, I still have some grunt work left - load/save, sound volume, and level stats - but the only major components left are a color picker and network play, both of which are effectively optional. It would certainly be nice if you could configure the colors (especially if you're visually impaired), but it's not really necessary.

There's also a part of me that wants to make the whole HUD configurable so you can move all the various bits around the screen, but what a monumental waste of time that would be. Scope creep is the enemy of every project.

 

My game is quickly wrapping up and I'm loving it. Functionally the entire game is done. Single player is done, co-op is done, the interactive tutorial is done. All the menus are there and work. The splash screen is there and works. All that's left is to apply some more polish on the graphics and spend some time play testing for bugs and difficulty before DBP.

So far if I had to rank the most interesting or challenging things I've done for the game, I'd have something like this:

1) Profile management. Keeping track of who's signed in, who can control the game, which controller is playing (since someone might be using controller 3 to play my game instead of controller one), and handling people signing in and out during the game. This wound up with some messy code around my game, but it's pretty good and solid at this point. Probably took a full week of time to get this all in and correct.

2) Storage devices. Another issue I spent a good chunk of time on. Basic storage handling, handling storage devices becoming disconnected in game (for example, the player chooses to save to the memory card and then, for whatever reason, removes it in the middle of the game), and multi-threading save/load operations for a smoother game experience.

I also had to make a sacrifice on one front whereby I save the game options to the public save directory (not profile associated). The issue is simply that, if a user has two storage devices, I don't want to prompt them twice for the save device so as to have one for the public directory and one for the profile directory. I instead opted to have the options save in the public directory assuming that most people are either on a machine only they play or that they won't mind options being shared (since I only have music volume, sound effects volume, and a color assistance option).

3) Multi-threading as much as I can. Mainly this applies to any of the storage stuff and content stuff. My game uses three threads during start-up to load all the content for the entire game. This takes anywhere between .5 and 5 seconds on my Xbox (why it ranges, I have no idea), but after that point there is no more waiting for stuff to load. I use multi-threading whenever I load or save the high score lists or options so that the user interface doesn't suffer any glitches. However for the actual game, I run it entirely on the main thread, with the exception of particles which I offloaded to the GPU (which did wonders for my performance).

All in all the experience has been quite the learning experience for me and I'm glad I took the time to really come up with solid solutions to the issues. I'm also glad to know that I'll be able to re-use a lot of this code in future games and make my life easier then. ;)

Cool, sounds like there is some dedicated competition. Here's where i'm at

Core gameplay done - few additional ideas to add if time permits

Performance and general user friendliness still needs work.

PostProcessing - 60% done, i want to play around as much as possible with the look to try make it as unique as possible.

Levels -Done 2/Wanted 10 - Designing levels is such a mamoth task on its own, once you got the layout theres the scenario to setup, play test, tweak play test tweak. Getting a nice balance is dificult.

Sound - Desperatly need sound, i was going to compose my own but i think im going to run out of time.

End of level / game screens - i have placeholder art for my gameover level end and game end screens but they are programmer art. so hopefully i can get an artist to change these before the deadline.

 

Any of you guys planning on giving the public a taste of your game closer to the deadline or after?

Nick, I wish I was as far along as you!

I'm starting to realise that there is no way I can get mine complete in time for the deadline, but I'd still like to get it in a submittable state even if some of the eye candy stuff (Particle systems etc) don't make it in time.

I'm currently in the process of adding System Link and XBox Live play support for upto 8 players, but then I found that my game only works on my main dev PC and some of the graphics aren't showing up on my laptops or my old PC, so I've got to debug that before I can get on with the network code.

Next is to add AI, so that you can have computer controlled enemies (Thereby adding a single player option). Sounds like a big feature to add this close to the deadline, but I 've fully worked out the AI algorithm I'm going to write, so its just a matter of coding/debugging it. Hopefully I'll have enough time.

Still got loads of little bits to add, such as explosion graphics (My players just disappeat at the moment when they die), end of game score table, particle system, more shaders and fancy in game effects, pause menu, more sound effects, splash screen, more levels, more in game models etc etc. Holy **** theres a lot to do!!!

Ben

i've still got a bunch of work left to get my entry submittable. it will not match up with my vision just yet, more work will need to be done post-dbp to achieve that, but it will be playable and fun i hope. todo roughly in priority order: - finish up some basic game logic - port to xbox (ordered a windows xbox 360 wireless adapter to help with this) + sign-in profile related features. - implement 1 to 3 ai opponents - implement core basic animations - sound fx - gfx polishing - some sort of score tracking - play testing - any gfx after-touches (shaders, particle effects, animations) my god, i'll be pushing up to that deadline for sure :S

I'm chugging along, slowly but surely.

I intend to give the DBP guys a "demo", which will consist of the tutorial, the start screen, settings to mess around with, and around an hour or so of the single player game. It's a nice frame of mind to have: I don't need to worry about extremely extensive content creation, Xbox Live functionality, or possibly even save/load game and profile nonsense, which as I understand could take me some time.

I'm setting an artificial deadline of September 15th, after which I need to port to the 360, get it running smoothly through optimization, and then finish up with the video and report for the DBP entry. Until then, I'll be polishing up the single-player experience and adding multiple difficulty levels, so that everyone may enjoy. = D

Are any of you guys, besides the couple that have, going to actually show your games? It's a little late in the game for any ideas to be stolen; I'm more interested is seeing what people have come up with now.

arrogancy:

Are any of you guys, besides the couple that have, going to actually show your games? It's a little late in the game for any ideas to be stolen; I'm more interested is seeing what people have come up with now.

I second that, that includes you arrogancy :) I'd love to see what games are going to be entered.

Well, I suppose you can have a gander. = D

http://i37.tinypic.com/17tzsl.jpg

OMGchaos

Don't worry, I have a nice tutorial, and you'll all be able to play come September 23rd. It's a rhythm game/RPG hybrid, with offense, defense, and mana recovery (seen as the three main boxes) all going on at once. Crazy hijinks ensue. = D

And yes, that background is COMPLETELY static and doesn't move in the slightest.

Afternoon all, hope you are well.  My first post here so a quick shout out to you all :-)

I'm part way through my game "Monaco 360" for DreamBuildPlay. The graphics engine is up and running with ai and other related stuff todo. It's a 2d classic top down retro racing game in 16:10 format 60fps. You can have a gander here <screenshot>.

I'm hoping it will do well on DreamBuildPlay and when I release it on community games for 200 points.

Regards,

twojame:

I'm part way through my game "Monaco 360" for DreamBuildPlay. The graphics