lunch development

For the last couple of weeks I’ve been developing a game during my lunch break at work. Why? Mainly because I had this project in my mind for a while and I wanted something fun to do while eating lunch. Since I’ve started working on it I made a habit of tweeting my progress after the break, around 1PM GMT+1. Since I’ve started doing so a lot of people have shown interest in the project, providing tips and some even wanted to see the source code or wanted to help on the project.

I never expected to get this much feedback from something like this so I’ve decided to try and write weekly blog posts about the project, I will still tweet daily about the progress and then make a weekly summary post with findings, problems and fixes.

Now, about the game. The game is a stealth, sneak around the level, isometric 2D XNA game build for Windows Phone 7.5. If I finish it and I’m happy enough with the result to submit it to the marketplace then I’ll port it to Monogame and release it on some other platforms (no, not you iOS).

What I have so far: I have a map, created with a free, open source program called Tiled. I use Tiled because it’s pretty easy to use and it provides libraries for Windows Phone to read the maps in an XNA project. Next to the map I have a player that can run around on the map, the player always stays in the center of the screen so I basically move the map around. I have an enemy, with a triangular field of view, who moves up and down between two points. The player gets spotted when he enters the field of view of the enemy.

What I’m working on now: I’m currently building a level editor with winforms. This will make it easier for me to create lots of levels with enemies and objects in them. I currently have the form, I can open a map and read out the size date from the .tmx file (.tmx get’s created with Tiled). I want to finish the editor now so I can complete a first level. Once I have a complete level I can finetune the gameplay.

Will I open source this? Currently not, there are a few people that I know personally who have access to the source code but the repository will remain private for now. Why? because I’m thinking about making this my first paid app (with a free, ad containing version) on the WP7 marketplace. If I get completely stuck I might get some other developers involved, but for the time being I will remain the only developer.

Can I give more information about the story or setting? I probably could but I won’t for now, I’m going to build up the hype meter for this project so that everyone will want to get it and I will get rich. Once I’m rich I can start up my own game developer studio, create Version 2 of this, get even richer, buy EA and finally get them to make decent games again. Then I’ll probably wake up and realize this was all a dream.

Should you be interested in following my project, please follow me on Twitter (@NicoVermeir) for daily updates or stay tuned for weekly updates on my blog.

PS: I’m going on holiday from June 12th until August 1st so there will probably be little to no updates in that timeframe.

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