With the end of alpha I never found time to return to the blog before the semester had ended, and had no ambition for blogging amid the Holiday break. With the spring semester of my Senior year here, it is time to rekindle the blog for our XBLIG game (current code name: "Ninja Avatar: The Trials.") Despite being MIA in from the blog over the past few months, I continued to work on the game.
I took advantage of the break to work on a some Unity3D scripts for the editor allowing us to harness the power of control and ease-of-use unity offers for level and prefab creation for our XNA level creation. The artists can now create a model, then use unity to set up custom collision walls, and save it as a custom xna prefab. They can even use the same model (and different ones) to build a collage of models into one prefab. (When loaded in xna it still only has to load the fbx just once, however.) These models are used for the level creation. Both the models and prefabs use xml serialization. On the XNA side we will simply reconstruct the prefabs as we build each level. This will greatly improve our performance and ideally our level creation/maintenance time. It was also key for quest/objective design for the levels.
Since the semester started back up ago last week, I have been adding some functionality to the tool such as an opacity slider for the display/collision models. I've also fixed several bugs and cleaned up the process the user has to go through to make it a more smooth experience.
In addition to working with the tool, I've been working on tightening the controls for the game. This game absolutely needs tight controls, and they just aren't there yet. I've spent some time with Overgrowth (an indie game under development involving light parkour) observing the controls hoping to get a better feel for what makes something feel so good and tight.
Additionally, in my spare time, I began doing some research for prediction and smoothing for out networking side of the game.
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