Category: Uncategorized

Posted on

New Project: Binary Blaster

Game Game Game Complete

With Resistor now on the XBox Live Indie Marketplace, I decided to start a new project.  I created the design a few weeks ago of a game where the player defeats enemies by shooting them in binary code.

Modeling

Tonight I brushed up on my Blender skills, since I want to use rendered models for the game.  For now, I still plan on it being a 2D game using sprites, but I’ll use rendered sprites instead of a making the graphics with a sprite editor.

The Wikibooks site has a really great tutorial for creating a simple model, which I worked through a long time ago.  It was helpful to do this again, especially since the last version of Blender I used was before 2.5.

In a small amount of time, I was able to create a simple humanoid figure.

 

Now I’m getting into new territory with bones.  I’ve tried moving models before in previous games without using bones, but it was a huge headache and didn’t look very good.  After working through the one page tutorial on Wikibooks, my model was moving with the bones pretty well.

 

Posted on

Resistor – On Sale Now for XBLIG

Buy Resistor from Xbox.com 

Resistor is now on sale in the XBox Live Indie Game Marketplace.  Try the trail version for free, and if you like it all 90 levels can be unlocked for $1 (80 Microsoft Points).

From the XBox dashboard, go to Games > Browse Games > Indie > A-Z > R > Resistor

You can also find Resistor in the Puzzle & Trivia Genre section

Thanks to everyone for following the development of Resistor!

 

 

Posted on

Submitted for Playtest

I haven’t done any development for Resistor since I submitted it to the Dream Build Play competition on May 30th.  Therefore, I went ahead and submitted for Playtest on the AppHub website.  I guess this is what it feels like to send your first child to school.  However, I’m sure that any feedback that I do get will be helpful, which will make the game better.

There must be some tough critics out there, because the Resistor trailer video instantly received a negative vote after it was posted on the DBP website.  Therefore, I went ahead and disabled voting on the video until the competition is over.  On the other hand, the video has been getting a lot of traffic, and it is now over 125 views  just for being posted for a little over a week.  I went ahead and made the video public, because it was previously unlisted where a link was required to view the video.  I also made a YouTube playlist containing the complete series of development videos.

After taking a break from looking at the game, I did play it again for a few minutes and noticed new ways to complete some of the levels.  I probably wouldn’t have noticed this if I had not stepped away from the game for a while.  These new ways allow some of the levels to be completed with fewer pieces, so I may need to tweak the requirement for the S-rank on those levels.

Not that I’m trying to overly promote the game, but I went ahead and made pages on Facebook and Twitter for the game.  I did this more as a precaution to keep someone from taking the “resistorgame” brand name on those social media outlets.

I also created new box art for the game, and got rid of the image that I rendered in Blender.  I didn’t want to give anyone the impression that the game uses 3D graphics.  The background is an interconnected mesh of battery, LED, and resistor objects.  I also used some of the trailer quotes on the box image, but I changed “fun for the entire family” to “fun for all ages”.  The former wording could possibly sound like it is a multiplayer game, which it isn’t.

Hopefully, the playtesting goes well and it will be out on the XBox Marketplace soon.  There are some changes I may want to make before putting out the final version, such as fade-in/fade-out transitions between screens.  I also have to jump through a few other hoops before I can actually sell the software.