at least Bad Monkee hasn’t used those bloody vuvuzelas! TheBoy about Kick Off Pinball

Building A Game In XNA - Part 6

By Nick H on 11/03/2009 at 13:45:44 - 3 comments
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Gamers expect games to just work?!
Giving my self a variety of tasks to try and keep my interest levels up seems to have paid off as I've motored up to 65 levels and done a fair bit of important work around the back end.

The tasks that I used to break up my time from just creating levels mainly centred around display elements, and starting to look at a few usability issues. Using the handy best practices list on the XNA site as a guide, I started adding a few of the features expected by users. First on the list was putting in a pause button, the fact all the animation is updated in the code, unlike Flash's self contained movie clips meant it was easier than expected to get the start button pausing everything on screen. Next was tidying away chunks of gameplay code so I could add in some code for the menus in the future without the whole thing getting cluttered. I didn't actually insert the menus yet, but I did add the handy script in the XNA list from setting up the "Press Start" screen which detects which of the possible four 360 pads the user presses start on and then sets that to the main controller for the game.

Of the elements I've looked at on the list so far, the section that has caused me to think hardest was the "Gamers Expect Games to "Just Work" on Any TV" section. The list advises you to set the game's resolution to 720p to ensure everyone can play the game on their set, and so up until this week I'd been designing it with 720p as my target. The 360 will automatically scale this up and down to the user's preferred resolution. However, non widescreen TV owners will be treated to letterboxing. Having suffered fro black bars squashing content in the past before I bought a HD TV, I started wondering whether I should go further than just supporting this bare minimum.

While I was mulling over whether I should be coding in something for non-widescreen displays, I was also building more levels. I've been working the level progression so the play area gets larger every 5 levels, and was coincidentally nearing the point where I'd have to make a call on the maximum dimensions for the play areas. Testing the levels was showing me that if the levels got much larger it would get more and more frustrating having to redo early sections of levels when if a user fails later on in that stage. Prior to this realisation I was pretty keen on using as much of the 720p screen real estate as possible, in order to create challenging later levels for skilled players. Having experienced the annoyance of having to redo chunks over and over whilst building the levels however, it became apparent to me that reducing the maximum size of the levels would be the best move, avoiding too much frustration from the repetition of solved areas as well as allowing me to make the game 4:3 safe.

With that decided I added some code to display the game at 1024x768 should the program detect the display was not widescreen. Here I was extremely glad of the work I did in week 2 on code for altering the on screen position and scale of the play-area which reduced this to a half hour job.

The visual side of production unfortunately hasn't come on as well with Nick G unable to work on the game both last week and this week. So the engine is still using the scaled up sprites from my original n-gage flash project.

On reaching the 60th level I have now introduced the last of the tiles types. I'm going to push on to 70 then begin playing through them tweaking and sorting them into something approaching a smooth difficulty curve. Here's a quick video of 3 of the levels I've done so far.

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#1 - Syrok - on 11/03/2009 at 14:35 wrote:

#2 - peej - on 11/03/2009 at 15:40 wrote:

#3 - Trip SkyWay - on 12/03/2009 at 06:51 wrote:

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