Little Longhorn – underway
So I’m working on a game project with Mads Laumann which we’re calling Little Longhorn which is a tower defense type of game. We started working on it a few months ago and recently picked it up again after a break. The idea originally came from Laumann, where he was building it as a Silverlight project. We soon figured out, that XNA looked like an awesome framework, having some past experience in it. So we expanded it into a Windows project, using Silversprite as a mediator to the Silverlight version. This allows us to have one codebase, which is able to build to both Silverlight and XNA with small modifications, which is pretty awesome!
But XNA not only allows you to build games for windows, but Xbox 360 as well. Being an avid xbox player, I really couldn’t resist the challenge of trying it out on it, although this does require a 99$ registration fee. But it was totally worth. After fixing two minor issues (we do some reflection stuff to load game objects) and a lot fiddling with my laptops monitor (but that’s a whole other story), I had the game running, which felt like a huge achievement!
Here’s a picture of my desk aka game studio ;)
So far, the game is NOT looking very impressive, for two reasons. We’re programmers, not graphical designers, so our content is pretty low standard so far, but we’re working on that. Second, we’ve been focusing a lot on building a solid base/engine, which allows us to work on all three platforms (windows/xbox/silverlight), work in several screen solutions, xml based data store of all game objects and a lot of other cool stuff.
We’re starting to shift focus on a more game feature oriented approach, since we now have a solid codebase to work from. So we’ll hopefully soon have an actual game to play ;)
