So, back to the 3D project..

Back to the main task in hand: the 3D XNA game which will make up my final year project.

Originally, I stated that my original plan would be to create a game along the lines of Microsoft's Hover! for Windows. However, for now, I'm going to set myself the goal of a simple 3D breakout game. This isn't the most original idea I'll admit, as a quick search of Google reveals, but I feel it is an appropriate goal for a first-time 3D game developer. This way I don't have to worry about 3D modelling of complex objects (as the "models" will simply be shapes such as cuboids and a sphere for the ball). If I find the Breakout project to be a success, then I may then consider expanding it to a Hover clone, time permitting.

For now, I'm in the basis of fishing around tutorial sites and building up my knowledge. The most helpful sites I have found so far have been:

• Riemers XNA C# 3D Tutorial
• Xbox 360 homebrew tutorials

As well as tutorials, I had to research the history of XNA for my introduction. I found this XNA Team blog to be a great help for this.

A couple of months ago I also invested in this book: Introduction to 3D Game Programming (Frank D. Luna). Whilst the intention of the book is to teach the reader 3D DirectX development, the first part of the book deals with the mathematics behind three dimensional movement and transformations, which I feel will be of great use in the future development of my project.

Best of Intentions and BioWars XNA

Yes, so originally this blog was to be regularly updated with my progress, and yet, nothing since the first post.

Well, the reason is because technically no progress has been made. None on the 3D project specifically that is. My reasons are genuine, at least I keep telling myself that and it does make me feel better, somehow. I've had other University coursework commitments; I won't go into boring details about most, but one of significance is that of my Computer Games Development & Design course. For this I was required to either extend and improve an XNA Pacman game that my lecturer developed, or develop a new game using his Pacman "engine". I chose the latter option, and developed a 2D two player shoot 'em up, named BioWars (named after the character sprites I used, from the Apogee game Biomenace). The game was developed in Microsoft XNA Game Studio Express Beta 1, and the source code requires the Beta 1 version of GSE to successfully compile and run. The music from the original version has been extracted to save web space and make for a smaller download.

You can download Game Studio Express Beta 1 here.
You'll also need to download Visual C# Express Edition (also free) here.

You can download the BioWars compilable source code (without music) here.


Screenshots:




The game is recommended to be played with two Xbox 360 controllers (vibration supported), but is playable simply using the keyboard.