It is nearly 7 pm Wednesday. The XNA Challenge games are coming together, but the participants are completely exhausted (most are keeping the hours of 8 am to 2 am). Despite their relative simplicity, it’s amazing that these games have rapidly progressed from a simple idea to an actual, playable game. The final day will be spent tweaking and testing game play.
But Houston has phoned in a possible crisis. The deadline is now 5 pm Thursday. The teams just lost two valuable hours. Sleep will be sacrificed, and evil glares will be directed at Dave Mitchell, Microsoft's director of Marketing for the Game Developer Group and XNA Challenge point man.
DungeonQuest
"Things were not so good today," Benjamin Nitschke said with a smile. He explained that they've been having a lot of problems. They set out to make a technically impressive game, but due to some software/hardware problems, they've had to ratchet back their ambitions. For instance, Benny wanted to have the cave and character lit from six different sources. That number has been reduced to three due to shader difficulties that were shutting down the game.
"We have a pretty long to-do list," Benny said. The user interface hasn't been implemented, the enemy AI is very basic and the game isn't a ton of fun. But with the game logic in place, Benny simply wants to make sure the game is playable. "It wouldn't be cool if you couldn't finish it."
AbduX
Andre Furtado has constantly added features to his game over the past few days and will spend most of Thursday tweaking level difficulty. Today he managed to get all the voice recognition features working -- alongside 'earthquake' (freezes on-screen humans), he has added 'darkness' (people lose their way), 'MegaAbduX' (clears the playing field) and 'reinforcements' (a friendly alien appears to aid you in your work). To recharge your constantly depleting tractor beam, abductors can say 'energy' to gain a burst of unlimited juice for a short amount of time. Now he just needs to add the voice recognition power pickups to the map and finish debugging the system before AbduX is officially finished.
Final Stand
“I lost half a day this morning,” sighed Josh. These PC-developed games must be transferred to an Xbox 360 tomorrow evening. Butterworth, already deploying to the console, found out his game was running at about 2 frames per second. Turns out there were too many collisions taking place at once. In an attempt to catch up with itself, the system was essentially doubling each dropped frame.
Now that the problem is solved, Josh is busy tweaking the difficulty level and fixing any remaining multiplayer problems.__ __
Simian Escape
The ape’s escapades have undergone radical evolution. Garage Games took pity on the Minnesotans and provided them with rad cave painting-styled art. The two have decided to incorporate this into the game mechanics – if Simian fails to stay inside the torchlight, he’ll be erased out of existence.
Despite a few coding stalls, the pair is almost finished with the game. Attacks and the scoring system are now in place. All that is left for Patrick and Jonathon is to fine-tune the game. They’ll even have time to attend Shigeru Miyamoto’s keynote.
