01/2010: game setup in XNA & figures

Okay, I had some adventures in 'project setup land' ... To start with XNA development you will need:

• Visual Studio 2008 (C# Express or commercial version)
• XNA Game Studio 3.1

To do things right, I thought that a version control system à la Subversion would be nice. But after some troubles (and very, very crypted error messages during some code checkins) I decided to throw Suversion out and to use plain old backups. The Microsoft SyncToy tool is very handy for doing this.

First thing to check out was video playback (since the intro and outro will be video's). Before XNA 3.x it seemed to be difficult, but in XNA 3.1 it works ... after a while. As it seems XNA is very picky about the encoding format :( Luckily Adobe AfterEffects has a lot of encoding options...

Enough technical issues, let's go creative again. This month some figures have been created! The first one is Simon, the others are his ennemies in level one. To create these figures, I used Adobe Illustrator. Additionally, the book Animatietekenen (Preston Blair) gave me some inspiration about figure drawing.