Games…. Games…. and more Games…….

Wish my title was related to the amount of games I have been playing recently but that’s total bull shit as it is related to the amount of games I have had to ‘try’ and make in XNA. It has got to the point on where I open XNA I automatically get depressed. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a challenge and I am learning something new which is why I pay for UNI in the first place but it’s getting depressing! But never less we have been given our last XNA task of this semester, our final game for our game design module.

We have been tasked to make a game for a persona that we made during the early weeks of the module, the persona had to be based on a non gamer, either a young female or an older male. My persona is based on my mum’s partner who is an older male and has little knowledge of hardcore gaming. The task was to make a co-op game that you would play with your persona and to see if you can get them into gaming. No problem I guess, but we had to go through the whole design concept of making games.

A lot of people had troubles with this as we signed up to the course for the programming aspects, not the creative side, if I wanted to do Game Design I would have gone to a crap university and done it there but never less we got on with it. My game is making some progress, the idea is similar to other games and this is where I will probably lose marks on my final grade as I wasn’t ‘creative’ enough on my programming course. Firstly here is a screenshot of my game, I will explain what is on the screen then I have recorded a small clip using FRAPS but to be honest, its nothing special!

My Game - click to enlarge!

Ok, so here is a screenshot of the main game level, very basic. As you can already tell my game will be a side scroller shooter. The art work is not final and there are some bugs in the game, this is nowhere near finished! The space ship will be the non gamer, their role is to shoot the incoming enemies (orange blocks), they can move up and down, also they can shoot their dual cannons (see video). The red block (top left hand corner) is going to be the gamer, they will have the power to keep the non gamer going, their main job is to collect power ups and heal the main ship.

The green/red block in the middle is a power up, from the video you can see that this slows down the enemies making them a lot easier to hit, the red block was meant to be a separate power up but I am having some random number issues which is what my plan for today is, to have all the power ups working! At the top you can see the health and score, health is a max of 100, the second player can heal the space ship just but hovering of it. The power Time is how long you got left until the power has run out. The white text is just for testing, will not be in the game.

So this is what the final game will look like, its in for next week, I was working on it a lot but my c++ work kinda stopped me doing my game, but this week and weekend is all about XNA so prepare for a raged Chris!

Thanks for reading, please comment with any suggestions or improvements, pretty much anything!

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