December Progress

I've been quiet on the blog for the last month, but I've been making steady progress. I've gotten to the stage with Mario where he is running around the level, the level scrolls in the usual Mario way, with him unable to go backwards, only forwards. He dies when he falls out of the world and respawns at the last respawn point he passed, and he has lives.

Next up, enemies (who are almost completely animated already), getting them into the level, letting them kill Mario and letting Mario kill them. After that its rewards, points, coins and powerups. That includes headbutting '?' blocks to get coins & powerups (not sure on the implementation details of that yet).

Finally it will be polishing up the whole level, tweaking the movement dynamics (which still aren't right) and adding in Title Screens, Menus etc.

A december finish for Mario is still on the cards, which would give me a full 2 months to work on a DBP entry before the details of the competition are even announced, and hopefully a further 2-3 months after that until the deadline. However, I'll need to spend some of that time upgrading Alta to XNA 4.0, and testing its performance on the Xbox (its completely unoptimised at the moment).

Assuming that takes up my time during January, I'll have 3-4 months in total to complete my DBP entry. I just hope it'll be enough!

Before I go, a note on Farseer Physics. I've been having trouble with Farseer and Mario. The biggest problem is the fact that I'm NOT trying for real world physics. In fact, I'm trying for very artificial physics. This simply isn't what Farseer was designed to do. My DBP entry is also not realistic in its physics. It remains to be seen whether I decide to keep Farseer for my DBP entry or try to write the physics that I need myself.

Until next time...