Since this video, I've updated the touch input... One Swipe is one move. I think you might want hyper sensitivity in the game, so I may just add a function that turns it on and off. Anyway, enjoy :D

Read More...»

First Run of Mr. Gravity on my tablet :D

Screen shot of the very very first successful run of Mr Gravity on my phone

The game was written for TV's, which is why this is not displaying correctly

Issues that I've found so far. 

• Sound does not play. I've corrected the background music by running the content through MonoGame's Content pipeline and defining it as Music content rather then sound effects. 
• There is a collision detection issue that is found on any wall that is convex in a level(See Picture)
• Images are coming out extremely weird. Not all, but as you can see with Mr. Gravity in this picture, he has really thick lines, that make him look really bad. Our neon lettering in our menus are really really awful. Not sure why it would do something like that.. Almost all the level content comes out perfect, except for these handful of content.
• There is a huge need for code refactoring. There were a lot of good ideas that didn't get polished, and it hurts the codes performance and makes it very difficult to read. A huge example of a refactor need that hurts perfomance is the content loader. We load stuff everywhere!! Half the files we are loading already exist in memory somewhere, and doesn't need to be read in again. My first effort to refactor the content is with music. It's now loaded in a music collection, and loads once, but only if it's needed(so it now doesn't load 10 music files right at startup)
• Of course, controls are bonkers right now. I wrote a nice little swipe gesture, and am working on motion controls. I refractored the entire control system, allowing for multiple control schemes at one time, but not requiring any number of control schemes. The game will check for what it can use, and make it possible. I also was able to take out the isXPressed, isAPressed, isShoulderPressed, etc, now that they have no meaning. Even if we went back to Xbox, the new structure is much better     

At this point, this is all I can think of. The game is working surprisingly well...Like way better then I ever expected for a game that came from an Xbox 360, written by a handful of college students who didn't know fully what they were doing. We wrote some solid code, considering the fact :D

Read More...»

There are a ton of required features needed to get Mr. Gravity running, and especially if you are on Windows 8(like me). 

List of requirements(As far as I can remember):

• Visual Studio
• VS 2010 Express C#
• Make sure you install VS 2010 Service Pack 1
• http://www.visualstudio.com/
• VS 2012 
• You should have this...You might be able to pass with just VS 2010 Express(I don't know if it will do as much as you'll need), but I can't promise that. 
• You need VS 2010 if you are going to use VS 2012
• If you have Windows 8 - Games for Windows 3.5 - http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=5549 
• XNA Game Studio 4.0 - http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=23714
• This video will help you get XNA compatible with VS 2012 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpDuczPxIvQ
• Windows Phone SDK 7.1 - http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=27570
• Xamarin - https://xamarin.com/ (You get a free C# shirt if you follow it's setup instructions)
• MonoGame - http://www.monogame.net/downloads/
• Git 
• First, you may want the Github app...It makes things a ton easier - https://windows.github.com/
• Second review all the tutorials I wrote that are related to pulling the project, just as a refresher
• http://dizgames.blogspot.com/search/label/Git%20Tutorial

Alright, if you made it this far, congrats!!! I'm sure that was rough, but don't worry...It's worth it. 

First things first, make sure everything is installed that is listed above and that XNA is set up to work with VS 2012.

Next, open up the Github app and set it up to the Git repo - https://github.com/DizWARE/Gravity-Shift.git

There are 4 new branches that I added into the main repo, that will be important for you. The first branch is Multi-Platform. This contains the starting point for all the new branches. The other three are: Android, iPhone, Windows. If you work on the iPhone project, use the iPhone branch, etc. We will merge back to Multi-Platform and them merge back to the master as work is finished on them. 

ANDROID:

Switch the the Android branch.

You should be good to build and attempt to run. Make sure you have an Android device; I haven't tried running on an emulator but I'm sure it's not as cool :P Make sure the Android project is set as default

A couple things that I've seen when running. My most common error has been when you start to deploy and it throws an out of memory error while trying to package the application. Clean the project...If it still doesn't work, clean the project, exit Visual Studio and open the bin folder and clear out all the files that are in the folder. You can then retry :) Not sure why it does it, but seems to have something to do with a cluttered output folder.

Most of the other errors had something to do with content being named correctly. If you need to look at the application file structure, in the output folder, you'll find a .apk file. If you change the file type to a .zip file, you can browse through it and see what is being copied over. All the content is held in the Asset folder.

Read More...»