Looking For XNA Partners For Game Studio Contest

[rover2341]

What?

Hi my name is Mark Dickinson. I am looking at participating in the XNA game studio contest. I am looking for others who are interested in this and would like to work with me on a project for the next 3-4 weeks. The Contest Started in April 6th and ends in August 6th. that leaves about 1 month from today. If you were to work with me on this we would be late in the contest.

My Idea and Thoughts.

My Idea was to base it off of the warcraft roller coaster game I have done. I know i could rewrite the code in c# in less then 2 weeks. And that's only the back end. I could handle Spot 1 and Maybe Spot 3. But spot two is what would hit me the hardest. The project would be written in c# in XNA Game Studio 3.1.

Team Members

1.Code - eating the code for the Builder/Rider/Camera (where it should be angle/location) (2 Game modes Free Build and Ai challenge)
2. 3d Models/Camera and move model on plane - 3d Models/ Working with models in a 3d space/Change camera.
3.User Interface/Building in game start video.


Week # 1

Plan

Create Full outline.

Week # 2

Complete Assignments

1.The Back end code done (Builder and Rider Functions), (2 Game Modes Free Build, Ai Challange)
2.A working project that can move a track piece around. A Camera That gos to the correct angle and location and zoom.
3.A User Interface For the builder. A way to open and close the program.

Week # 3

Mesh/Tweek/Debug
We mesh it all together to create project. Tweek as needed.
Add more limits and test for user interface for ease of use many tweeks and test would need to be done here. Create a starting Video for the user.

Week # 4

Add additional Content

At this point we have less then week intill we have to turn in the project. But depending on how the time gos we add additional content like objectives Game modes and add any additional systems to help the user learn to play fast and enjoy them self.

Idea Project is based off.

To have in idea of what i would base this off Check out this video here, its a video of a roller coaster game I have made for warcraft.


About me:

I am currently in Egypt for winning the US Imagine cup with my 2 of my brothers (http://www.mymousegames.com/).
I have made Tetris in XNA (Cant find it...). I have been working in sliver light and expression studios to develop games/Programs (Tetris).
I have built Roller coaster, tetris, and battle trains for warcraft.
I am in my 2ed year of collage going for a CS Major.
I know I am not as knowledgeable able as many on this site but I can learn
and work hard to Finsh this project. I have alot of time this summer to work on it as i am not working and not going to school.

Final Note:

I don't believe this idea will win first place even if its polished and works perfect as is because a huge part of the contest is Innovation. But I believe we can come up with some great Innovation ideas on the way. I do believe this will take quite a bit of work in a short amount of time, but as long as your enjoying what your doing we have nothing to lose.

 

[Dr Super Good]

Is such a game suited for use on the Xbox360? Generally builder / RTS games are not very suited for the 360 due to lacks of accurate controls like a mouse and hotkeys from a keyboard.

I guess you could map 8 buttons on the controler to be 8 build instructions and use the analogue sticks for navigating / managing the camera. The direction pad can then be used to bring up options and stuff. As for interface, like with most 360 games you hardly need one next to displaying some data and maybe some cool slide effects for options.

Atleast saving tracks would be easy, as you should be able to write them to the 360's hard disk. On top of that you could make good looking backgrounds and use motion blur when riding to give a more impressive looking terrain.

However it would look strange if your track could float, you would have to find a method of allowing some kind of visual supports for it. Remember to take advantage of what the 360 does best, textures / AA. Thus for best visual looks try and use under 256 MB for the actual game program and calculations so you can use over 256 MB with textures.

Also for the tracks, you might wish to use a more fluid track generation system whereby instead of straight segments, the track can cuve more fluidly than that used in WC3. Remember that tracks and stuff are metal, so lightning is more important for them than textures.

Like mentioned earlier, the background would play a major viewing role, so one should be able to edit / manipulate it in some way when creating a track to make it look more impressive.

As for actual gameplay, you could have free build where you have virtually no limate and you can save highly complex tracks just for the ammusement of riding them (maybe with firends on XboxLIVE which would role in bonous points for you in the contest scoring due to the likly hood of people messing arround and getting immused.

The other more serious gameplay could be a sort of challenge / point based. The challenges put you under cerrtain conditions. Points are generated for the complexity of your rides. The challenges could be make a coaster of under a certain length which scores above so many points. A leaderboard could also increase competitive ness here.

You could also try making it more competitive via turning it into a busniess game. Each player starts in the corners of a square grid based map with one square. On that square you can make a ride and stuff like that. Each square is only leased, meaning that it can be brought from you which clears everything you have on it (with some refund) and gives ownershiip of it to the enemy (allowing you to buy it back but at a higher cost than he payed for it). The quality of the rides earn you money and the idea is to eithor eventually own all the land on the map (if you own no land you lose) or in a more peaceful mode is to own the most money after a certain time. Money could be a form of score as well and also the idea is that this made should be both complex in the number of actions you can perform but intuitive and easy to learn and use.

Generally this project will be quite hard to do, especially for the 360 due to no mouse / keyboard for hotkeys and also limated RAM so models and so code must be efficent.

 

[rover2341]

I like just about everything you said. But I dont think there will be time to make it to that high of a standard. But depending on how far we get I think it should be built in the general direction of what you were saying. I Relly like the idea about places that you own like a plot.

For support beams thats good thing to note. Thanks

I 100% Agree with the scoring and saving of maps.

I will have too see where i can get with the time and it also depends on how much of a group i get.

As for efficient coding. Besides all the 3d stuff the logic is very simple. And i don't think it will have much of a problem rending tracks and shadows. But this is new territory for me, so this project may be nuts to try to do in this amount of time yet here i come...

 

[Dr Super Good]

For shadows the most efficent and quick way would be to use shadow mapping, whereby it performs a separate height map from the view of the sun at what you can see and compairs the image darknening pixels which are out of view from the lightsource yet in view of your camera. A lot of 360 games use this as it allows even selfshadowing on objects and stuff realtivly realistically.