Angry Robot Rampage

It has again been a long while since I have written anything here and to those of you who care (if there are indeed any of you out there) I apologize. On a positive note however, I have actually been working on something that might be worth writing about.

Over the past two months I have been working on a game for Xbox Live Indie Games, and it is now on the verge of release - This is my story.

In the beginning, I knew whatever I was going to work on would need to be small - I had to be able to complete it over the summer. That meant no sweeping story-arcs, no endless levels escalating into ever higher and obscure difficulties, and no torrents of exposition about the characters motivation and inner most feelings (not that there's anything wrong with these things - but I knew I didn't stand a chance of pulling off such a game). I needed something with a small enough scope so that it could be reasonably polished, fun to play, and artistically appealing.

In mulling over ideas for the game, one idea kept coming back up, and that was SHOOTER. I had recently played a fantastic game for the iPhone called 'Zombieville: USA' (I highly recommend checking it out if you have an iPhone) You play an intrepid adventurer batting through hordes of zombies while slowly leveling up and gaining new weapons, it has some really nice design, and a wonderful art style. I wanted to create something like this then, but what, and how?

Work began very slowly. The first thing I knew I needed was a protagonist, but how to create such a chap? I began by creating a little man through the use of a sprite sheet (where I would draw each individual frame of him running) but this soon proved to be far more arduous and time consuming than I had first anticipated. (I can draw, but an artist I am not - My respect for animators and people who do this full time has increased exponentially - especially the artists who worked on the XBLA game 'Shank'). To remedy my inadequacies in the art department, I decided that the protagonist could be updated and animated (though somewhat crudely) through the wonders of computer code. The hero was born.

I had a man on screen, bobbing up and down in front of the CornFlowerBlue background that all XNA coders will be familiar with, but then I realized - 'What the 'heck' do I do next!?'

This stage of development is probably one of the worst (perhaps just behind bug fixing). You know what you want, but as with anything in programming, there are about five million different ways of going about it. To get me moving again, I went in search of inspiration. I am eternally grateful to the example code and tutorials at creators.xna.com. I dug through many of them, looking at techniques and examples to give me a better understanding of what I should be doing, and how I should be doing it. In particular I would like to make mention of the GameStateManagement and SafeAreaBounds examples. They helped me a lot in the beginning in getting my game structure working as well as the lovely scrolling background.

A few weeks later and things were slowly starting to take shape. I had a robot who would follow you round, a scrolling background, different states to handle my game, and.... well that was about it. At this stage I had what you call programmer art. (Please see below)

It was time to step up the time I was working on the game and start making stuff look cool! I contacted an old friend of mine named Richard Dorran, a fantastic artist and video game compatriot. I realized if the game was going to look any good at all I was going to need some lovely background art (largely to distract from the mediocre game play). Richard happily agreed, and it was then that the game went from 'lame prototype' to 'OMFG, this looks like a real game!'

Many discussions ensued ranging from the number of enemies to the color of my protagonist bandanna. Slowly things started to take shape, and within a few weeks, we had something that looked like this.

It was looking better, but the game play was pretty dreary (far more than it is now believe you me). It was over this part of development where programming is the most fun. You have the basic structure in place, and adding features doesn't seem as painful as before. You can experiment a lot, and see what works, and more importantly, what doesn't. It was in this phase that grenades were added, as were the red patches on the enemies back to cause them to blow up in one shot, and finally a flying enemy to make the enemies ever slightly more varied.

Before I knew it we were nearing completion. At this stage focus was moved to the sounds and menus and all other manner of things not related to the game itself (which all add up to be a lot more than you think). Another good friend of mine, one Ed Trethowan provided some lovely background music while SoundSnap.com provided the screams and dulcet tones of my hero that grace your ears. It was here too that I realized we needed a developer name, and ToRchEd was born (See if you can guess why that was the name)

The last and final hurdle was the addition of a high scores table. This was one the most painful programming problems I have ever experienced. The save and load operations required for a high scores table worked perfectly on the computer, but as soon as you tried to run it on the 360.... BOOOOOM - Error Code 4, thank you, try again. You of course cannot debug your code while it is running on the 360, so good luck finding out exactly what went wrong. I was stumped for a while on this but finally managed to crack it (I will upload how I did it soon if anyone is interested)

Now came the scariest part of all - submission. Up until this point it had only been me, my family and a few close friends who had laid eyes on the game, seeing it slowly take shape over the weeks and moths I had been working on it. Their comments were always positive and encouraging, but what happens when you throw it out to the internet.. What if they hate it? What if all of this has been for nothing!? Luckily things went smoother than I had thought, the community at creators.xna.com are very friendly, and they were constructive and helpful in their criticism. It is thanks to them that multiple weapons were added as well as a slightly higher jump, and a slew of other small fixes.

So here ladies and gentlemen, is the finished article.

As I sit here typing the game is in the process of peer review and should be out within a week or so. It has been a roller coaster ride, with ups and downs, and thrills and chills. It has been a fantastic experience, and I cannot wait for the rest of you adorable people out there to be able to play it!

I'll post here again when the game is available for public consumption.

(P.S. Here is a link to a video of the game! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ix31gnNFgJU Enjoy :))