With the closing of Funland last year, Union Station may have Toronto’s last downtown arcade. The games are mostly crap, but there is this one bootleg Ms. Pac-Man machine with alternate mazes:

If you aren’t familiar with the mazes, you can see that something is wrong because the bonus fruit travels through walls!

techknight Gaming arcade, bootleg, toronto, union station

This is my final version of the Cannon game. Cannon Zero has these changes to the engine and gameplay:

• New graphics
• Sound effects
• Large 1280×720 playfield
• High score display and loading/saving
• Player is destroyed when the target crosses out of bounds at any time, instead of just the bottom of the screen
• Various changes to the target’s angle and speed of decent
• Projectiles are no longer fired unless the mouse button has been released from the previous click

The score display was implemented using the SpriteFont class and the Metal Lord font from Larabie. (The Larabie fonts are free for personal and commercial use. Found via this post on the XNA Creators Club forum.)

In the notes for Cannon III I said that I would take a look at using an Xbox 360 controller instead of the mouse… This kind of broke the quick movements necessary to play the game so Cannon Zero is mouse-only.

Download

Click here (extract and run setup.exe)

Screenshots

Video

techknight Game Development, Learning 3dbuzz, cannon, game release, xna

Saw a fun album cover generator on DadHacker just now. It takes random text from Wikipedia and a photo from Flickr and makes an album for you.

Here are my favourites so far:

techknight General flickr, generator, wikipedia

Cannon III is complete. Just as Cannon II borrowed a lot from Cannon I, this game reuses code from Cannon II except now we’re using the XNA framework. The assets file provided by 3D Buzz contained some enhanced graphics labelled XNA, so I used those instead of the boring default sprites.

Here’s a video of Cannon III in action:

That wraps up XNA Xtreme 101 Volume 1. Before I move on to Volume 2, I’m going to make my own final version of the Cannon game. Probably with new graphics, sound support, and Xbox 360 gamepad support. I’d also like to fix the issue with CheckFire() being called too quickly – which is causing the projectile to be fired on BeginGame() and ResetTarget().

techknight Game Development, Learning 3dbuzz, cannon, xna

Recently I used QuickPWN to jailbreak my iPhone, and one of the great tools not available in the official App Store is iBlacklist. As other Canadians know, there’s been an unfortunate increase in telemarketing calls since the National Do Not Call List went into effect.

With iBlacklist, I just add a number to the blacklist, choose an action (auto-hang-up, straight-to-voicemail, etc), and I never have to receive an unwanted call or SMS again. The application keeps a log of what it has blocked:

That’s three unwanted calls in the last few days that I never even got a ring for! (According to 800notes.com, this particular caller purchased my information from a credit card company.)

techknight Gadgets, General blacklist, iphone, quickpwn, telemarketing

One quick introductory XNA project before getting into Cannon III: The Simple XNA Application. It’s just a new version of a bouncing ball demo that was originally created as a regular Windows app:

It looks like the lessons could get a little tricky, as they were created with the XNA 1.0 Refresh. Version 3.0 is the current release, and I can already see that the content manager is structured differently. No problems so far though.

techknight Game Development, Learning 3dbuzz, simple_xna

Cannon II is done now. It’s pretty much Cannon I, except using a (mostly) proper game loop and custom classes.

For fun I’ve changed the graphics and added sound effects using SoundPlayer from System.Media. I used a tool called sfxr to randomly create the sounds:

The graphical changes are the very worst in programmer art, but what the hell… Here it is in action:

Also, while I was looking for something else, I came across this tool for generating animated explosion sprites: Explosion Generator. Might be useful later.

techknight Game Development, Learning 3dbuzz, cannon

That’s the end of Cannon I. The game is now fully playable with a title screen, lives counter, and increasing difficulty.

Here’s a video of it in action:

techknight Game Development, Learning 3dbuzz, cannon

For the second game project in 3D Buzz XNA Xtreme 101 we’re writing a simple target-shooting game called Cannon. From a single initial design, the game will be implemented three times. First as a basic WinForms application, then as a more complex one with custom objects, and finally as an XNA framework game.

The mechanics of the first implementation are complete, with the rest of the gameplay to come in the next lesson.

The objects in Cannon I are PictureBoxes loaded up with some simple graphics supplied by 3D Buzz. Here is the player ship firing on the moving target:

techknight Game Development, Learning 3dbuzz, cannon

Last week I completed the Hyperion lessons, leaving me with a finished engine and basic game about rearranging some objects into the correct rooms.

I worked a little on making my own original game with the engine, but in the end I wasn’t inspired. As much as I have fond memories of early text adventure games (Scott Adams’ Adventureland, Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy), it doesn’t seem like I have anything to bring to the table. Plus I’d rather get on with the XNA lessons.

I added a couple of things to the engine before I finished though:

• Lots of command aliases like “get” or “take” instead of “pickup”
• Directional commands are implemented differently from the way that 3D Buzz guys did it
• Partial text matching for items so that you can “drop gre” instead of “drop green ball”

So, that’s it for Hyperion. On to the next block of lessons.

techknight Game Development, Learning 3dbuzz, hyperion

The combining I mentioned recently is now complete. The old URL (www.gameslifeandstuff.com) will now forward here. Unfortunately the comments were not able to be imported along with the posts that I chose to save, but from here on the data should be more portable.

I’ll work on a proper Wordpress theme soon.

techknight General admin

I first tried Comté cheese at Matt and Dani’s place. Apparently it’s cheaper in Kensington, but this little block of heaven from St. Lawrence Market was totally worth it.

Yum!

techknight Food cheese

Instead of continuing to have two separate blogs, I’m going to rename and backfill this one with selected posts from gameslifeandstuff.com.

The RSS feed might become temporarily cluttered as a result.

techknight General admin

The Hyperion engine is now complete enough to start a game:

Next up are game rules and fleshing out the rooms and items.

techknight Game Development, Learning 3dbuzz, hyperion

I’ve been continuing the 3D Buzz XNA Xtreme 101 lessons before work this week… Now the “Hyperion” text adventure game engine is starting to take shape. As the methods are discussed, I like to pause the video and fill them in myself before seeing how the instructors complete them.

I’m curious to know how someone new to programming would feel at this point. This early portion of Volume 1 jumps right into development with only a small amount of whiteboarding and explanations, promising in-depth discussion later on. It seems like a good approach, giving a feel for making something “real” before trying to lecture people on the intricacies of C#.

techknight Game Development, Learning 3dbuzz, hyperion