I can’t say I was enthralled by this compo’s theme, Alone, all that much. It took some head pounding to come up with an idea, and even though I’ve somewhat settled on one, the details are still sketchy. Regardless, I started working once I had my setting: Space. I mean, how much more alone can you get than in the final frontier?<\/p>\n
Admittedly a bad policy, but I hate to work with placeholder graphics for long. The first thing I set out on was my space man. There were a few iterations before I settled on my “final” (All graphics will be tweaked to no end, of course) design.<\/p>\n
After I’d gotten that out of the way, I got down to a bit of real coding. My game would need a halfway decent 2D camera, so I set out to Google for this one. David Amador’s 2d camera worked like a charm (found here\u00a0http:\/\/www.david-amador.com\/2009\/10\/xna-camera-2d-with-zoom-and-rotation\/) and that was a simple step. Problem was, I could hardly tell I was moving.\u00a0I threw together some random noise stars, made a few tiles, and set up a random tile selector. It was functional, but lacked flair. That’s on my to-do list.<\/p>\n
Movement felt stiff though, so I worked on some floatier movement to better fit the space setting.<\/p>\n
Now, any good space man needs a shuttle, so that was my next stop. I had a placeholder, but again that nagging for a good looking place holder bugged me until I put some work in to it. It still lacks flair, but much like my backgrounds, can wait for later. I threw on some broken pieces for the forthcoming gameplay, and was ready to call it a night. Here’s a screenshot that shows my progress thus far:<\/p>\n
![http:\/\/i.imgur.com\/sE0Vk.png<\/a>\u00a0(I didn’t want to embed the image, it gets all stretchy and nasty :\/ )<\/p>\n Honestly, I can recognize that my order of work is a little backwards. I don’t even know if I’ll like my game yet, but I’m already working on assets. I feel like this is going to leave me with overall weaker gameplay, but I have a hard time imagining where my game is going when I’m looking at squares. LD is supposed to be a learning experience though, and I feel like I’m learning a lot about the way I work. It’s not a pretty lesson though.<\/p>\n I’ve got a to-do list for tomorrow, so for now I’ll catch a few hours. Night, LD.<\/p>","time":"December 17th, 2011 5:34 am","title":"Day 1\u2019s progress"}](\"http:\/\/i.imgur.com\/sE0Vk.png\"){kind=link}