So for anyone who cares and hasn’t heard me rant about what I wanted to do with the XNA stuff I’ll just explain it now. Ryan inspired me to go in the direction of a shmup, I have wanted to do one for a long time but this new framework seems ideally suited to a game like this. There isn’t any particular art style or theme set atm so I’m just laying out some really basic shmup gameplay elements that are pretty much ‘required’ to have a respectable game. One of the key ideas though is to completely leverage the 360 controller. I want to have a very natural action mapping to the controller that makes sense and gives you more control than simply shoot and move.

A few concepts that I am borrowing for the GD are:

  • Roll defense from starfox
  • Polarized attack for the enemies ala ikaruga (radiant silvergun), the difference here is that ground targets must be bombed, squigies must be railed with mass driver weapons and conventially shielded enemies require beam weapons.
  • All weapons are effective against all enemies but certain weaons are much more effective. This technique is vital to survival.
  • Ability to equip a small pod that can has limited controlled and it’s own set of upgrades.
  • Clip/reload system for mass drivers/bombs, energy system for beam weapons. Ammo is plentiful but must actually be collected and you cannot hold the fire button the whole time.

Here’s a screenshot debugging one of the triggers for a mob spawn and the new bullet system:

Again, not very impressive looking (it looks better in action) but I’ll just layout a few of the things that are working now.

  • Follow camera
  • Scene trigger system that can fire proximity events
  • Mob controller with spawn/death management (hooked to trigger system)
  • Mob action scripting pcodes with time driven events (Fire, Rotate, Change properties etc)
  • Random terrain generator

I’m not trying to do a fully polished game currently. Just something that starts up allows you to play through a random level with increasing difficulty and records your high score. I will probably implement a few different types of weapons as well.

I don’t know if I want to finish it all in one shot.. I have to get back to some other stuff.. really ;)