[font=arial]What? Another game already? That's right, but this one will not be as big as my racing game project, which I expect to be ongoing for several months and likely at least a year. No, this game will be a short-term project, only planned for one month as part of the One Game A Month quest. I want to get in the habit of finishing games quicker. (Maybe then I could rename the blog Electronic Meteor Games! Imagine that) I want a game I can make more quickly and easily, and just as well be leveraged by the coding experience I have gotten so far. So it will re-use some of the code I'm currently working on right now, but refactored to fit the needs of the game.[/font]

[font=arial]The game will be a twin-stick top down shooter. The idea may not be original, but carrying it out should be fairly easy. I do not have a name for it yet, only know at least some features in it will include multiple levels and upgradeable weapons, local multiplayer (not sure yet if I can finish online networking code in a month), and a cool lighting atmosphere for the graphics. So basically what one may expect from a top-down shooter. Characters and setting will be fairly abstract and basic. I don't have much know-how for modeling human characters so it will be robots blasting other robots.[/font]

[font=arial]Here are the main goals I intend to follow for the month-long project:[/font]

• [font=arial]Simplistic but nice to look at graphics and setting[/font]

[font=arial]I have been mostly inspired by some of the fast-paced games being put up on Steam Greenlight to do a top-down shooter. It's a genre that is simple fun and engaging for many people, and I believe that a (stripped down) top-down shooter can be another good game for budding programmers, comparable to platform games. So for this month, I will be slowing down progress of the racing game to work on this one.[/font]

[font=arial]On the AI side, I have been reading this set of tutorials to create a state machine. Many game programmers may be familiar with the game state switching pattern to code a complete game. These tutorials take it further in applying it to other ways, like setting up rooms for a dungeon crawler or computer-controlled AI characters that follow their own motives. The latter is the one I'm most interested in. I plan to implement the tutorial code for this game to give me a head start on the AI. It won't be pretty but the functionality is what counts here.[/font]

[font=arial]For graphics, I mentioned the Meteor Engine, but I will not be using it as-is. Rather, the game will have its own graphics code that will take several ideas from the engine. It will be a trimmed down, sort of "lite" version of the engine code, using mainly deferred rendering for graphics. The intent is to provide a setting with many moving lights, and most outdoor daytime scenes aren't good for that. Features include mostly dark rooms, bullets that light up the room along the path they take, reflective surfaces on characters and level objects, and point light shadows. A lot of the visual inspiration comes from the Frank Engine demo, so expect the game to look more or less like that.[/font]

[font=arial]I will code this with XNA, as usual, but I will also try to get it portable to MonoGame. I have been researching this for a while but attempts to port any of my code to other platforms haven't gone well so far. MonoGame (in its current 3.0 version) on Mac seems to be a no-go with Snow Leopard, something to do with the Apple SDK's not being up-to-date with what MonoDevelop uses so I would have to upgrade XCode to 4.2 which requires a Lion upgrade. Not up to doing that right now. So it will likely be on Linux before Mac :P The cross-platform support is not part of the month-long deadline, it's just something I would like to do to take my game further like online multiplayer.[/font]

[font=arial]I would like to get started today with programming the game, if I want to finish it before the 30th. Just for today to use a placeholder model for the character, draw everything with basic graphics and make the character shoot in all directions. At that point it's not very different logically from a scrolling shoot-em-up. So look forward for more posts related to my month-long game. It's been a while since I actually release a game and I want this to be the most complete game I've released so far.[/font]