After several months with no contact, I have bad news to deliver. The book I completed, that was in review, will not be published. In February, Microsoft announced that XNA is done. It will see no more development, and all official support will end as of March, 2014. With news like that, no publisher in its right mind would publish a book on it right now.
I had neglected this blog, as this affected far more than just the book. Most of my game development classes used XNA as a standard for development. So I had to select a new development engine and get myself accustomed to it. I'm pleased to say that I'm nearly ready to introduce a new series of classes based on Unity 3D. I've spent the last two months figuring out a game to build to take advantage of the 3D environment, and at the same time simple enough that it would be a good starter game. So I chose to make a Real Time Strategy game.
RTS's are not simple, but huge undertakings with a lot of work. But I'm not actually building an RTS. Instead, I split the game into its 3 key areas, a City Builder, a Tactical Game, and a Strategy Game. I spent a while on GameDev.Net's forums talking with other developers and players about what the best parts of RTS's are and what their missing. In the end I came up with a solution that turned into a project code named Warp Wars.
I started planning it out, created a full GDD (the light type I normally use for Design Classes) and started building. Since the start of it in January, when it started as a small spark of an idea, it has grown into a project with 10 people offering help on it, a blog with hundreds of views every week, an active User Voice site (where people (and me) are bringing up ideas and bugs) , a public/private development forum, and most importantly, the real website and the Live Demo.
The blog gets regular updates, but here are a few snap shots of the progress in the game:
The Live demo has functioning registration, the map is different for every player, scrolling and rotation of the near infinite terrain and in the next two weeks, we plan to add the first in game menus, and the ability for a player to add buildings. Connect to the blog for regular updates.
Kenzie's Project:
I'm also please to bring up a project on kick starter, about a 9 year old girl making her first video game. It originally started as a fight between her and her brothers. They said she'd never be able to build a real game. Instead of get discouraged when things got tough, she got going. She researched how to do it, found RPG Game Maker and a training course for kids her age, where you end class with an actual game of your own. The only problem is that the training package and the environment came up to over 1000 dollars.
She and her mom, started a kick starter project to see if anyone wanted to support the idea, and get a a copy of the finished game out of it. Kick Starter exploded with responses. Unfortunately many of them were complaints, even threats, saying the whole thing is fake. But fortunately, over twenty three thousand dollars in small individual contributions have taken Kenzie's initial hope and turned it to something bigger.
They've created a site called Pinkie Square, which is based on her in ability to say "pinkie swear" when she was younger. This site is dedicated to helping kids learn to make their own games. You really should check it out. And when you do, drop into the Create section, and check out who's going to help them setup training videos and Q&A for kid's game development.
That's right, I will be. :D This is re-igniting some of my earlier plans of Learn Build Play being an online training community. I'm preparing some videos now that I'll be posting on Pinkie Square, this blog and the new version of the Learn Build Play website that is underway now. Pinkie Square will be focused on Kids, and Learn Build Play will cover more, but teaching kids is a strong passion of mine. I had to go through a lot of hurtles in education growing up, so I'm doing everything I can to make those easier for the next generations.
Check back soon for more updates.
