Super Cube Racer

I've started working on yet another new game (Wilhelm's War is on hold). I call this one Super Cube Racer. It's a mix between Minecraft and Mariokart, I'm hoping to find fun gameplay in between these two wonderful games.

There is no design document or any set in stone plans but here are some ideas in my head:

- Random race tracks, every race is different
- Split screen multiplayer (1-4 players), offline
- Weapons/power ups, some of which may allow for temporary destruction of terrain to slow down the other players
- Map editing by letting the player place down cubes, probably start off with randomly generated terrain but no racetrack

I'm targeting Xbox 360 Indie, and possibly the PC.

So far I've been mostly working on the "voxel" engine, it's been a few weeks and I think it's in a pretty good shape. I'm now starting to cram a racing game into the engine. Here is a video of what I've got so far:

Sketchy Tower Defense on Xbox Marketplace

Sketchy Tower Defense was finally released on November 26th. It's been doing quite well since, staying in the top 7 downloads the entire time. Have a look, try the trial. If you find that you enjoy it the full version is only 80 MS points away (about $1 USD).

Sketchy Tower Defense on Xbox LIVE Marketplace

Sketchy Tower Defense going through playtesting!

I finally tied up some loose ends on Sketchy Tower Defense, and I've submitted it for playtesting to the XNA Developers Community. If you have an XNA Dev account then check it out!

Another night another car

This one is one of the junk cars from which Wilhelm will be able to siphon gas from. Not sure how many of these junk cars I'll draw in the end, probably just two or so.

Car pixel art

I sat down tonight to draw Wilhelms car. I started with a black outline based on some photograph I googled up. Then I took it from there, adding detail and some light shading. This took about 1.5 hours, plus another half hour skimming through some pixel drawing tutorials!

Wilhelm's War

The little character test I posted the other day was from a game I'm working on called Wilhelm's War. The game is still in the early stages, but here is a screenshot.

The core of the game is walking around the desert looking for car wrecks to siphon gas from, while shooting down zombies. Once you have enough fuel you jump in your car and drive to the next level, rinse and repeat.

The idea is to keep the game simple so I can actually finish it this time!...

Character animation test and 8bit graphics

I've added a new feature to PickleOS. It now allows me to create a surface with any pixel magnification to establish an "8bit" effect. Initially I did this simply by scaling everything I drew. This worked fine, until I started rotating sprites. Rotating a sprite by 45 degree rotates the pixels as well so that they end up looking like diamonds, not squares. To do proper rotation I instead had to render the entire scene at 1:1 scale to a texture, and then draw the texture scaled up. I've implemented this at a low level in the windowing code so all I have to do now is specify what pixel magnification I want when I create the main game window.

My first real use of this feature is in a little character animation test for a mini game I'm working on. The character is made of 4 parts, the head, the torso, legs, and arms. The head, torso and legs animate without any rotation, but the arms rotate around between -45 and 45 degrees. This works very well, and looks great in motion. Here are some still pictures.