#OneGameAMonth - Game 1: Week 2 Update

Hello everyone, been chipping away at Zombies!!! Run!!! for a couple days. Replaced some of the dummy art assets with something better, and tweaked the gameplay a bit - added a distance counter and a score counter (but no weapons or pickups yet so nothing will increase your score in this release)

You can now move up and down using the up and down arrows, and your character will snap to each of the 4 lanes. I found it was easier to do collision and z-indexing this way, and its easier to judge if your character will hit or not. The characters hit-box is the shadow at his feet. I've got my daughter on my lap as I write this, so I'll update with more info later. Have fun!

Alpha Download

#OneGameAMonth - Game 1: Mockups

#OneGameAMonth - Game 1: Zombies!!! Run!!! Prototype

I've come up with a prototype (Windows Desktop only at the moment, sorry!) the assets are all rectangles, so its not much to look at. Pretend the blue square is a running person, the large red block is a horde of zombies, and the purple blocks are misc obstacles. Fun, right? It's a start lol. The controls are:

Up/Down - to navigate menus,
Enter - to confirm,
Esc - to pause/exit,
W - to move player up,
S - to move player down

The players' collision rectangle is 1/3 the size of the blue rectangle, so only the bottom will collide with obstacles, in the near future this will be represented by a drop shadow, and the player will of course be an animated sprite.

There is no winning condition, and it isn't too difficult yet, you will return to the main menu when the horde catches up to you.

P.S. Let me know asap if the installer doesn't work for you, this is the first time I've published an XNA 4.0 game.

Prototype Download

Hello World! #OneGameAMonth, Tutorials, and Zombies!

So, since I never complete any of my projects, I've decided to get right into #OneGameAMonth and start making small games. I'm going to attach another constraint and make games in genres I don't normally like. First up I'm making an endless runner, and since most of my ideas have included zombies, I based it around running from zombies.

It's tentative name is "Zombies!!! Run!!!" and right now its being built in XNA 4.0, with the possibility of getting ported into windows 8 and tablets and phones and whatnot if I can figure out the content processor in MonoGame.

You are some dude/gal that is trapped in a creepy school in a seemingly endless hallway filled with crates, lockers, dead bodies, radioactive fluid, and other crazy stuff that acts as obstacles. Your goal is to avoid the obstacles and the zombies chasing after you, hitting an obstacle will allow the zombies to catch up to you. Once the zombies get you, its game over.

Right now I've made a prototype using the Game Management Sample as a starting point, swapped out some menu graphics and created a scrolling background in the gameplay screen. Then I added 3 different rectangles to represent the Player, Zombie Horde, and Obstacles, and put it together with a beginning and end. This gives me 3 weeks to polish it up and add content, and a winning condition, maybe extra levels outside the creepy school.

Moving forward, I hope to create games in the following genres:

• Rogue-like 
• Metroidvania 
• Turn based RPG
• Puzzle
• Strategy

Also in this blog, I will be documenting my progress creating a tile engine and subsequently, a game - possibly a Zelda style dungeon crawler, since we can never have enough of those. This will cover MonoGame, Windows 8 and XNA development. The goal is to get 2 posts a week, one being a tutorial for the Tile Engine, the other being an update on One Game a Month. Sometimes, the two will be related, but currently - Game 1, "Zombies!!! Run!!!" is a standalone project.