 Want to play Vintage Hero but don't have an Xbox? No worries, now you can play it on the PC! Get it for only $1.99 at desura.com. Next up is a long overdue update for the Windows Phone game Cryptogram adding 300 new puzzles. Till then... Artwork by needyourdisease.com
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 I'm pleased to announce Vintage Hero will be available on the Xbox Live Indie Games Marketplace Wednesday, July 24th for 80 MSP! Here's the deets...  When Earth comes under attack by alien invaders, the peaceful denizens expect their old hero, Giga Man to once again save them. When it's clear he's too wrapped up in the tempting night life of the robot glitterati, it's time for a new hero to arrive. Help Floyd, an unassuming custodian at the county jail, his mentor Mac and his lifelong friend Kricket defeat the evil General and his invading alien army! Action, platforming, and everything you love about the 8-bit gaming era brought back to the modern world with a classic chip tune soundtrack and a gripping story.
Out of the lethargy of legends begins the dawn of new heroes… You can also download the complete original 8-bit soundtrack for free!
Check out the main entry on Vintage Hero for more.  Artwork by needyourdisease.com Well it's been a while but I've been chipping away at Vintage Hero in the last few months. I'm happy to say the game is done! I still have to go into peer review and I'll announce a release date after it gets approved but for all other considerations, Vintage Hero has gone gold. To the left is the game box art and below you'll see some game videos and the back of the box I'll be sending out in the press release. Here's a description of the game story: When Earth comes under attack by alien invaders, the peaceful denizens expect their old hero, Giga Man to once again save them. When it's clear he's too wrapped up in the tempting night life of the robot glitterati, it's time for a new hero to arrive. Help Floyd, an unassuming custodian at the county jail, his mentor Mac and his life long friend Kricket defeat the evil General and his invading alien army! As you can see in the video below, the game is done in a retro pixel-art style and is obviously heavily influenced by Mega Man, but with my own added twists and level design that hopefully come together to make a fun game. If your a Mega Man fan, a fan of platformers or retro action/adventure games I think you'll find a lot to like here. Here's the trailer and game intro:  Finally, to the right is the back of the box. No one will really see this outside of press releases and on my website but I thought it was a cool thing to make anyway. Click to see it bigger.
Vintage Hero is coming to Xbox Live Indie Games followed by "other" platforms in the near future. The release date will be announced soon.  Once again the deadline for Dream Build Play rolls around and this time I actually have something to submit! While it's not finished, Vintage Hero is actually pretty tightly polished up through the fourth level. The last two levels and final boss sequences are still being worked on, so I didn't include them in the DBP build. Browsing through the gallery of the entries so far has left me tremendously impressed and even a little bit intimidated. There's some really good looking games being submitted that seem like they'd be a ton of fun to play! At the very least, it's confirmed my plans to find an artist to punch up the graphics a bit once I get closer to completion on the game. I'll leave you with the recent trailer made for the contest entry and say good luck to all the devs who are submitting this year! There's gonna be some great games to come out of this year's challenge! Let's face it. Rumble and XNA haven't had the best history. I still hear people refer to "massage games" and such when people talk about Xbox Live Indies, but there are many out there who can now look past the sea of undesirables and see the potential and successful. It's come a long way since it's innocent beginnings. Yet many developers still shy away from utilizing force feedback and some that do, use it in a brute force kind of way that can annoy the player. Even some AAA titles seem to just set the motors at full blast for three seconds when you crash off the road. Ugh. When it comes to rumble, subtle is the way to go.
Before I go on, I'd like to say that the following code is free to use in your game and is licensed under the Microsoft Permissive License with one caveat. You can not use this component in a game where the sole purpose is to vibrate the controller. You cannot use this for a "massage game" or any other where the purpose of the application is rumble based. You can only use it to enhance existing gameplay where otherwise, not having rumble will not change the objective of the game. Hate that I have to say it, but it needs to be said. Here I've implemented a time dependent, dynamic based rumble component. I've played many indie games that accidentally leave the motors running until I quit to the dashboard. You can get around this by using time based triggers. When an event happens that requires force feedback (say a collision) just add a new rumble for a set amount of time and when the times up, the rumble stops. To make things subtle I use the idea of dynamics. Since sound is a vibration, we can use it as an example in which to compare. In music, dynamics are control over the volume of the sound, or intensity of the vibration. By varying the dynamics over time, I could apply a "shape" to the controller's rumble. I've added the ability to change to different rumble shapes by calling them by name, such as binary (on/off), linear (start at minimum and increase to maximum over time) or parabolic (fade in to maximum by time/2 and fade out to minimum by time). To make the pseudo 3-D effect of the trophy and ship spinning around each other on the final screen of Space Racer I just used a simple scaling trick. By gradually changing the scale in SpriteBatch it appears as if the sprites are zooming in and out along the Z-axis. To do this, let's first make a new Windows Game project in C#. Call it SpinningSprites. Click OK, build and run the empty game to be presented with the familiar cornflower blue screen. Now that we know everything was created as planned we need to add content to our project.
Go ahead and copy these images to your hard drive by right clicking and saving. Or if you'd like, you can use your own images. Add them to the game by dragging the images to the SpinningSpritesContent project in Visual Studio or right click on the SpinningSpritesContent project and choose Add->Existing Item. Find and select the images and click Add. Now that we've added the content it's time to add some code. Towards the top of the class, add two Texture2D variables just after the GraphicsDeviceManager and SpriteBatch declarations. Texture2D imageOne;
Texture2D imageTwo; Looking at the new samples on the creators.xna.com I see they have an example for using virtual thumb sticks in a Windows Phone 7 game. I like it, but I decided I wanted a version with the thumbs sticks fixed in place, much like you'd see in an iPhone shooter like Call of Duty: World at War: Zombies. Here's a screen of the result.  The first thing I decided was to not make the Virtual Thumbstick class static, but instead a DrawableGameComponet. While not consistent with other XNA input implementations, it allows you to add one or more thumbsticks to the list of components and let them load, draw and update without calling any methods. You can simply look at the thumbstick position, see if it's greater than zero, and determine what to do with it when it is. So the game's on the marketplace and I couldn't be happier! I just want to say thank you again to all the peeps who took the time to playtest and review Alawishus. I never realized but a great thing about being an XNA member is playing so many of the cool games that come through playtest and peer review. I'll be sticking around there for sure. I suppose I can take a quick sigh of relief and then I guess it's time to get right back to work on marketing the game. There's also that Tales of Leisure thing too...
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