48h contest winner: shrt !
July 27, 2007 – 11:55 amGood work Shrt !
Here’s a direct link to his winning entry.
Like he just said on IRC, “great, now we can start a new one !”, as soon as possible 
Time to vote folks !
July 23, 2007 – 12:49 amEntry links:
Mart’s entry: Virtual Mountainer
Inverse’s entry: Brokecar’s Mountain
July 23, 2007 – 12:41 amScreenshots:
Binary:
Available here.
Source:
Available here.
Author’s comments:
For this theme, I wanted to make some kind of mix between motoracer and destruction derby with cars and see how much work could be done in such a small time frame. The goal was to destroy your opponent car while staying alive and do some rodeo on the mountains. I wanted to reuse some freely available assets and refactor some code from XNA’s creators website. Also, I wanted to evaluate the time needed to make such a game.
What went wrong:
I’ve lost too much time on trying to repair an alpha related bug. I was more focused on features that are unused in the demo instead of implementing the car physics first. I’ve wasted my time trying to glue some code from the XNA racer starter kit (which is badly written imho), I’ve removed the experimental physic code because it wasn’t good enough. Also, I shouldn’t comment the code when I am in a hurry.
What went right:
The core framework is pretty solid and the code is clean. Except the car physics, everything is glued together and with a few more hours the gameplay would be integrated. The game has a deformable heightmap, skybox (ugly though), menu, 3d sound support, billboards, chase camera, bloom (private joke), and last but not least the ugliest resource manager ever (UglyResourceManagerBecauseIDontHaveTime.cs). I’ll be able to reuse a lot of code for an optional contest framework written with love.
Conclusion:
Outsourcing may be cool to gain some time but it’s painful when you inherits the bug, like from the effect shader of the deformable heightmap from rare that I debugged and some troubles with the car assets (the car texture is awful). Focusing on the gameplay first is wiser with such a short time frame is the way to go and using poor assets with look enhancing techniques like cel shading is a good idea too.
Pekuja’s entry: Fall Down
July 22, 2007 – 11:47 pmScreenshots:
Binary:
Available here.
360 version available here.
Source:
Available here.
Author’s comments:
This game is really bare bones. It’s a simple puzzle game and there are no in-game menus or anything. The game doesn’t even restart when it ends. Anyways, this game was really a way for me to dip my toes into XNA. I haven’t done very much in it so far. And unless you already figured it out, the game is played by moving your guy left and right with a 360 controller’s left analog stick. You get better score by hitting several blocks of the same color in succession.
Mart’s entry: Virtual Mountainer
July 22, 2007 – 11:41 pmScreenshots:
Binary:
Available here.
Source:
Available here.
Author’s comments:
Soon.
Shrt’s entry: fwah
July 22, 2007 – 11:35 pmScreenshots:
Video:
Binary:
Available here.
Source:
Available here.
Author’s comments:
The game is at its core very basic; you have this fat dude, and you have to tap your keys like a madman to get him to run up the stairs that have been conveniently placed on the side of a mountain.
Stuff that sucked:
I knew beforehand that time management was Key to (extremely) short compos like this, but still, I managed to pick an idea that involved more 3d modeling than i’d ever done before. This was bad, since i’d classify myself as noob++ when it comes to modeling. So I bounced around a couple tools (wings3d/blender) and got majorly frustrated by importers/exporters that didn’t work as expectedly. I ended up spending an entire day to get some decent produced, and even for a prototype it’s still really low quality.
Stuff that went okay:
Since I lost an entire day doing icky modeling, I had to cut down on the gameplay ideas I wanted to implement. Still, in pretty much one day I managed to get the very basic gameplay mechanics in place and, and a speedorific easter-egg :P.. However, the code was so rushed that I think if I had to keep working on it, i’d rather start all over.
Conclusion:
All in all, I wish I had sticked with one modeling tool which I think would have resulted in atleast a couple more hours to write more code/better code.
Time’s up !
July 22, 2007 – 11:29 pmHere’s the participant list:
- Pekuja
- Mart
- Shrt
- Nerdy Inverse
Here’s the “I have surrender like a french” list:
- Cryovat
I’m currently sorting and uploading the entries and I will make separate posts for each one.
The vote for your favorite entry will take place right now and will end wednesday, 25th of july.
Contest’s theme is “mountain” !
July 20, 2007 – 11:02 pmThe vote has spoken, “mountain” will be the theme for this week-end competition !
Happy coding everyone !
Theme vote launched !
July 20, 2007 – 10:35 pmYou can vote for 3 themes from the 8 proposed.
Here’s the theme list:
The poll will end at 10:00 PM GMT !
First contest friday 20th of July !
July 13, 2007 – 3:02 pmThe title says it all. The first contest will take place friday 20th evening. The theme pre-selection will take place during the day on the #xna channel. Feel free to give some theme ideas to feed the polls !
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