Graphics!!!

Well, the book I ordered still hasn't arrived. I spoke to the ebay seller last week who said that it had been sent 2nd class, but it still should have arrived by now. Its disappointing as I'm approaching the half-way point in my time off and I really wanted to be ploughing through that book by now.

Still, I've kept going in my XNA endevours. Tetris is now complete, with working high scores, music, and game modes.

I'm starting on PacMan, and I've already abstracted out a simple tile engine from the tile manager code I created for Tetris. I'm now working on creating a basis for my 2D rendering engine.

There is however some other news. Over the weekend I received an email from the Sunburn people offering me a promotional price on the community license for the Sunburn rendering engine for only $150 dollars. For non-creators club members (like me) that license would normally cost a massive $399!

It was too good an opportunity to miss, and so I now own a copy of Sunburn:) I'm still intending on abstracting out my own custom renderer using the Sunburn engine behind the scenes, so that in the future I can write my own rendering engine if I so choose without breaking any of the games that have already been built with Alta.

Sunburn will greatly speed up the process of getting the engine into a finished product. Once that happens I'll be free to tinker with sections of the engine behind the scenes without changing any gameplay code.

As I've said before, ultimately I'd like to be able to replace the XNA underpinnings with C++ and directX, and possibly OpenGL, but that is a number of years in the future at this point. In the meantime, I'm hoping to be able to update you on PacMan later this week.

In what I hope isn't the beginning of feature creep, I've decided to create a level editor with PacMan to alter the 'Maze' that the game is played in. Whereas I made a basic level editor with breakout, I'm planning on creating this editor as a stand alone winforms project, which I'll then build on when it comes to Mario.

I'm really hoping at this point I'll be able to get started on an original game before the end of my holiday, as that should give me the momentum to keep going once I'm back at work...