Alex McGilvray

Last year I posted some videos of a shooter I was working on in XNA. Unfortunately I ended up going to school for programming and then getting a job through the School’s CO-OP program. Well things have died down temporarily and I’ve had time to catch up on many game related projects I had to put down when my studies began. I now try to spend a few days a week working on the game. The artist for the game also comes over and works at my place 1-3 times a week.

I find that working from home there are a lot of distractions, by having another developer working along side of me we tend to keep each other focus and get more work done together than individually. It also helps to be able to discuss design decisions in person. IMO that will always be better than over the internet.

The game we are developing is Cult Retribution which is a shoot-em-up game with leveling and weapon purchase/upgrades. I plan to use some RPG concepts to encourage players to use a wide variety of weapons rather than just a few choice OP (overpowered) weapons. I plan to do this a couple ways. One is to have damage types for bullets much like the traditional Final Fantasy Fire-Ice-Lightning types. Attacking a fire-element enemy with fire element attacks would do little damage but attacking a fire-element enemy with ice element attacks would do lots of damage.

Progress on the game has been getting better and better. I started the game by writing the engine which is interesting but it’s not game development. There was a lot of initial time where the artist had to wait for me to figure out how thing will be done in the engine before he could start working.

I’ve now got most of the engine work out of the way and have decided to write LUA exporters for the DAME level editor rather than write my own level editor. This has saved me a ton of time and allowed me to focus more on the game itself rather than it’s supporting technology.

In this video you see me create a level in DAME really quickly. Export it. Then load the level in the engine and play it.

Plans next are to add various scrolling cloud layers to the game to give a sense of height in the game. Post-processing shaders for different events are also being investigated. We want the game to have a much darker look than what you currently see in the video.

I will be making a point to post often about Cult Retributions progress both for the readers and myself so I can guage how much work I’m getting done.