Avatar!

Nope, not blue aliens with plaits that let them talk to alien animals. Nope, not the cutsy Xbox version of Nintendo's Mii's.

I'm talking about the actual meaning of the word, a proxy visual token to represent another object or person in the virtual world.

This weekend I've been working on my animation engine for Alta. As well as various structs and helper classes, I wrote a class called AEAvatar. This is to be a class which will be a component of the upcoming AECharacter class, and manages the visual representations of characters, including playing and queuing animations.

It's finished but untested as yet. I'll be writing the wider character class this week, and putting together a quick sample that plays animations loaded from the editor.

Next up, physics (which will be a wrapper on Farseer), character art and putting animations to use, some tweaking of various systems,  and then finally gameplay.

I'm a long way behind schedule and Mario is taking longer then I'd hoped, but the engine is still progressing.

Once Mario is done I'll be migrating Alta to xna 4.0, and potting Mario to windows phone 7 to test the engine's performance on the phone. Then on to my first commercial game.

I *will* have my first game out by March. Maybe...

PS my wp7 device arrives today. Going to be awesome, can't wait! :)