BeaverBlog » xna

Fog of war in XNA

Karl — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 12:48:58 +0000

Just thought I should show one of the effects I’ve been working on for my towerdefence-game lately. It’s a simple (but quite nice looking) “fog of war” effect that hides any enemies that are out of sight from the towers. I’ve also added a nice radar tower to demonstrate this (with a cool sweep-effect).

The youtube video sucks I’m afraid, it blurs everything down even though I uploaded a really nice looking highres video. Will update this post with a download link for the original video file later on for those interested in seeing what it should look like.

Update: Here is a link to the original video that I submitted to youtube. It looks A LOT better.

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8NihfHALkY

Towerdefence in XNA

Karl — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 22:42:48 +0000

Just thought I should write a short one about a current project of mine. I decided that I wanted to try to make a game (a real game, not just that old pong-clone I made while learning C++ all those years ago) and since I work mostly with managed code it felt quite natural to build my game using a managed framework. For those who don’t know about the XNA Framework I would recommend a visit to XNA Creators Club for some more information.

The game I’m working on (with a tiny bit of help of a friend of mine who still has about 70 lines of code that I haven’t touched in the project) is a realtime strategygame built around the towerdefence concept. Some sort of enemies tries to get from point A to point B without getting killed. To kill them you build different types of towers along the way that hurt them in different ways and hopefully enough to not let them through. For each creature that get to point B you lose a life and when enough get there it’s game over for you. If you want to know more about this type of game http://www.towerdefence.net/ is a great place to go looking.

Below is a short video I recorded from the latest build of the game. It currently only features one type of tower and one type of enemy and they both use some placeholder graphics I made in Paint.Net so don’t expect to much of that. If you happen to have some graphics skills and would like to help out then you are very welcome!

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5wPSRH5xTk

And another thing, it’s also best viewed in fullscreen mode since the video was recorded in 800×600 resolution. Hope you enjoy it!

State of everything

Karl — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 10:03:56 +0000

It’s been three weeks since I quit my old job now. Three weeks and I finally feel that I’m getting back to coding for the fun of it. I’m currently going through my old projects seeing what needs to be completed, tidying up my svn repositories, fixing this blog (more on that below) and so on. I’m also working on a small techdemo for a small game I’ve been working on with a friend of mine using XNA that hopefully will turn out as a really fun project and a really cool game. More on that in a later post though.

I’ve been doing some work on this blog the last few days, I changed the url to get it closer to my main site, updated WordPress to 2.7 (whoa, suddenly I’ll want to write things just to see their awsome GUI), added some stubs to articles and codesnippets that I feel I want to post and I’ve finally added my feed to feedburner to get some stats on my subscribers aswell (and avoid the hassle for everyone to change their subscription url if I decide to move again). The new url to subscribe to is http://feeds.feedburner.com/crazybeavers/blog.

Oh, and I’m home sick today so if this post doesn’t make any sense to you I’ll blame it on my cold.