Author Archives: admin

Back to Square One

Don’t worry, we’re not dead. The blog posts dried up because our current project took a major detour. We decided to put Throng on hold because we couldn’t possibly do it justice in the time remaining for Dream Build Play. So, two months before submission deadline we made the radical decision to change tack completely. Enter project Square One. Part of the reason for this change was that we read an excellent article called Subtractive Game Design in Game Developer Magazine by David Sirlin. Scott suggested that we don’t really need gravity, and in fact it makes so many things …

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Floating Platforms

I love it when code can be reused in ways you didn’t think of when writing it. These platforms are moving up and down controlled by an animation. I knew I’d need that ping pong looping mode for something! For good measure, here’s a sample of the XML that defines the moving platform: <XnaContent xmlns:Generic=”System.Collections.Generic”>   <Asset Type=”Generic:List[Throng.MovingPlatformSettings]”>     <Item>       <Name>platform1</Name>       <ModelName>platform1</ModelName>       <Speed>1.5</Speed>       <PathOffset>0</PathOffset>       <Moving>true</Moving>       <PingPong>true</PingPong>       <Vertices>-1 -0.25 -1 0.25 1 0.25 1 -0.25</Vertices>       <Path>-2 10 -2 2</Path>     </Item> </Asset> </XnaContent>

Throng tech info

Language Throng is written in C# with XNA Game Studio. This was the only choice as we intend to release the game for XBox Live Community Games. Whilst this may seem limiting, C# and XNA truly enable rapid game development. Sometimes progress on the game seems to be rather slow, but it’s rapid considering the amount of time I can put into it as a hobby. Physics Currently, the only confirmed external library is the Farseer physics engine and I’m extremely happy with it. I initially tried writing my own 2D physics system which was used in Balls Unleashed. It …

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Throng

Welcome to the Gnomic Studios development blog. We’ve set this blog up to show off progress in our first title, code named Throng. It’s going to be entered into this years Dream Build Play contest before being released on Xbox Live Community Games. You can expect to see some teaser images soon, courtesy of Scott and eventually some videos. – Aranda