03/04/2010: the XBox 360 controller

Last week was low on blog posts due to the Microsoft Techdays. Those 3 days were reallly interesting for my job but there were also two lunchbreak sessions that were interesting for my game project:

1. XNAsteriods : How to develop the asteroids game in 30 minutes with the XNA framework. Two things I learnt that could be interesting for the game:
1. The use of Game Components: the game currently does not use the game component concept. This was a decision that was made at the start.
2. The use of a previous controller state. That could be handy for the game; will try to implement it one of those days.
2. Introducing the Windows Phone 7 Series developer experience. It seems that XNA will be very important on that platform; can't wait to see a Windows Phone 7 device :)

Today (saturday) I presented a status update to my mentor and got feedback on the project. As for now, the game is still on track and everybody is happy, yippie :) I also bought a Xbox 360 controller and tried it out: it works like a charm!

Two things will have to be added to the game engine in the weeks to come:

1. HUD: when playing the level, the player should be able to see the health bar, the lives, the ammo, ... by means of a HUD. I think it will not be too difficult to integrate that in a clean way.
2. Pixel-perfect collisions: the physics engine calculates collisions by means of bounding box collisions, but sometimes this can be frustrating for a player. So I will try to implement pixel-perfect collisions.

However, from now on, more focus will go to the figure animation by means of the Anime Studio Pro software.