Games, Life, and Stuff » cannon

Game Release: Cannon Zero

techknight — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 03:34:14 +0000

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

Cannon III

techknight — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 07:11:39 +0000

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().

Cannon II

techknight — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 02:23:28 +0000

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.

Cannon I part 2

techknight — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 02:55:01 +0000

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:

Cannon I

techknight — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 12:07:01 +0000

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: