Nick Gravelyn, that all the “XNA crowd” should already know for his constant presence at the XNA forums and for libraries like EasyZip; sent us an email to tell that he has just started a new serie of video tutorials on 2D tile maps in XNA.
Nick was so kind to feature our TNOTP Texture pack in his tutorial, and made our little evil eyes very happy and proud. :)
Evil textures apart, his first video-tutorial is an excellent introduction to 2D tilework in XNA, and if you are interested in learning some game development basics with XNA you should definitely check it’s video out (and those that will follow shortly).

Now, let me run a little test with a super secret mesmer-o-pattern i accidentally blended into those textures … “Would you kindly …” :P

While the team is almost completely focused on the development of Polpette, we still manage to find some time for IMPACT!.
Just to show you that we did not forget our game with starships we updated our website … you can find a very misterious screenshot and some concept art visiting the game page.
Well that’s all for now, I’ve got to go building some tiles for Polpette, or else Duke is going to test our collsion engine with my face, with 500+ real asteroids. :P

Small update

We found thet the G installer was corrupted and re-uploaded it. Please let us know if you encounter any problems installing the game.

Finally we are back with some new stuff for our website! And for “new stuff” i mean a new project.
The project name is “POLPETTE” and it’s a mini-RTS we initially designed for the Silicon Minds contest. During the development we decided not to rush to complete the game to meet the contest’s deadline, we wanted POLPETTE to be a complete game, and so we decided to skip the Warm-up contest this year.
Now we will be able to explore the stange gameplay we are building in POLPETTE and to develop a complete, fun, and polished game.

Both IMPACT! and POLPETTE will use our “EVIL engine” and share the same tools we are building to improve our production pipeline. This situation should allow us to bring them both near completion within this year.

POLPETTE looks like an RTS, with two opposing factions of “creatures” fighting fo supremacy. The player does not have complete control over them, they will likely act accordingly to their “personalty”.
Every unit has a peculiar set of skills and properties, that you can clone or mix in order to produce future generations of units. Cloning or mixing creatures with different behavoirs the player decides how it’s “swarm” is organized and behaves. Cloning the aggressive or the obedient, mixing the strong with the smart, will they obey your orders? Will they be aggressive? Will they be strong and Brave? Fearful but fast? It’s up to the player, and his decision will determine the evolution of the swarm and it’s survival or total annihilation.

We can’t show you any complete screenshots of the game, but here is our first game concept, and a screen taken from the prototipe playground in action.

Our other “super secret” project is a really very simple game, IMPACT! is a multiplayer and expanded version of G.
It will feature team battles, several game modes other than the basic “deathmatch”, different starships with different abilities, multiple arenas and powerups, and a faster gameplay.
IMPACT! is really giving us some headaches, expanding the ultra simple orbital-smashing gameplay of G is not an easy task as we initially thought; every addition will likely ruin the “flowing” of the game or make it too complex and less responsive … but testing ad reinventing this game is teaching us a lot.

I know, I know, we are late… we are four days late; the italian date of the XNA European tour was november 28th.
But let me say just a couple of things about that day. It was a great day, even if I had to wake up at 4 in the morning …

It was a great day because here, in Italy, it is very rare to have such an event about videogame development; it was a great day because we saw something new about XNA 2.0 and because we had a chance to hear people from the industry talking about how they make games, and what it takes to get the games done, but above all it was a great day because we listened-up to professional people.
This may seem not so uncommon to people from other countries, but let me say it again, here in Italy these things do not happen frequently … they almost do not happen at all… but I will stop my writing, before I complain MORE about this situation.

At the end of the day we were very happy, the speakers were absolutely great, the atmoshpere was full of enthusiasm adn we had a chance to grow our network; too bad we did not win the X360 elite … but at least we got some Vista DVDs! We also had the chance to meet our friend Brago !

Let me finish this post with slightly disappointing note about the project in the works. We regretfully HAVE TO change the name of the project we just called IMPACT! We thought it was an original and funny name, but it is not. There are 300.000.000.000.000 things out there called “IMPACT!” or “impact” or “ImPaCt!” or whatever and we just have to find another name. I know, it’s lame to change the game’s name after it was announced, but we will live with it.

Something like “Super Fun With Asteroids and Starships with Shileds and Other High Tech Stuff, Multiplayer Edition Ultra” should be STILL unused … at least we will not have to change the logo too.