aaaaand the second episode of the podcast is finally up. We recorded this last sunday and now i can’t even remember what we talked about, so here’s the podcast anyway.
Mini Link Dump:
Turns out that google “shop view” is a real thing :S
The Wii Remote head tracking stuff (what I’m thinking of basing next year’s project on)
I’ve decided to start a podcast, mostly to be able to post something new once a week, with my good friend Jon Yes, neither of us really have any worth to start a meaningful podcast, but it’s just so damn easy to do!
In the first episode, we spend half the time not knowing what to do and the other half talking about the new doctor who (spoiler warning for second episode):
[inward looking wall of text warning]
Despite not actively working on “The Cannon” at all at the moment, I have been thinking about it and how happy I am with where it’s going. Is it what I want/wanted to produce? Is it fun? If I wasn’t the developer would I genuinely want to play? From where I stand, I would say yes to all three, but I could’ve easily lost sight of them along the way. I’ve probably wasted a large amount of time just messing around with the game in various stages of development (with and without very interesting bugs) and having fun with it, so I would have to class that as a good sign.
The main core of the game is almost complete, I’ve had it running at pretty much the level of the game I want for a while now, but there remain various things I want to add, the faffy things like menu systems and obviously the occasional bug. It’s a lot of little things that very easily pile up.
I’m not expecting my game to have the tremendous amount of polish that’s in a lot of other games, even when compared to other indie games. I think this will show most in the graphics and, if I don’t get my act together, the music.
On the other hand, I feel that there is a lot of polish in terms of features. Various game modes, unlockables, medals and a couple of other things unannounced (and which nothing will be spoken of until I have got them working) are all coming together which make the most of the core game mechanic. By now, I probably could’ve copped out, releasing a gameplay core version and then later I could release a sequel with these other things, but I’m setting this out as a sort of “ultimate version” from the start.
Below is my target schedule, these dates are only very rough, but should give you an idea of when I’m back to working on the game and when to start expect me to finally wrap things up.
June 3rd – Last University Exam
August 1st – Submit game to playtest and release a trailer
August 24th – Submit game for Peer Review
The time after this is then variable (and not down to me) but if peer review takes over a month it gets rejected 
Now to disappear for just over 2 months unless I come and update here when I’m bored sometime
I feel I need a sign to put here when nothing’s going on, the hiatus means I have very little to talk about in regards to “The Cannon”, but I keep forgetting I can post other things on the site. Use it as a blog almost, although not quite as mundane. As expected, exam revision is doing my head in, but I now have a confirmed date that I can get to work on “The Cannon” again, as my last exam is on June 1st.
As a rough estimate, I’d say this puts release at mid august, but don’t hold me to that. Being said though, if it’s not finished by the end of the holidays, I may need to gauge my eyes out with a rusty spoon or some other unnecessary, horrific and unhelpful act
Also, I am currently cutting some footage from splosion man for an achievement hunter video, so may have something new for that quite soon. Maybe…
Hi everyone!
I decided it might be a good idea if I pointed out some new accounts for things I’ve created, mostly related to the cannon, but they could well be used for other things later on.
Firstly, is a new Flickr stream for screen shots for the Cannon. With the ones on the site being out of date, it seems fair to change the method I add them (fiddling with html is tiresome). Therefore, new screenshots will be added to the stream, which you can find here
Secondly, I will be posting the music from the game up on the Bandcamp website. Currently there is nothing there and I will probably make a huge note of it whenever I post new pieces of music up there, but I thought it might be nice to know that I plan on doing this and that you’ll be able to hear some of the music from the game as it’s being made. “The Cannon” Album page can be found here
Finally, for any questions (although no-one seems to comment on the website anyway) you have about the game that you’d like to know, or possibly about me, you can ask them anonymously over at Formspring and I will do my best to answer them. That can be found here
I will probably get around to adding these to the quick links at the side of the page in due course
P.S. 4 days isn’t bad right?
P.P.S I really need to draw myself a new self portrait. I feel bad using the one Luke drew for me everywhere.
Sooooo…no update for 3 months. Yeah, that didn’t happen (it’s just hard to hide a vast expanse of nothing)
Updates on “The Cannon”:
Sadly, university work is heavily piled on both through the term time and the holidays, so while I was able to make some progress over christmas, it wasn’t a sufficient dent into what I have left to do. As the Easter holidays are very important for end of year exam revision, my work on “The Cannon” itself is on hiatus until the summer holidays. Having a much larger period of time at this later stage means that I’ll be able to tie-up and complete all of the features that I want to put in. I will return to posting about the game features soon (might make it a regular friday thing if I can find a way of balancing everything).
“The Cannon” part of the site:
Some areas of this are actually horrifically outdated now. Most things still apply to some degree, but the content of screen shots has changed a lot. The interface maintains the same concept, but looks very different and the background is due for a minor overhaul. I’m still unsure as to whether I might even change the title screen (although sadly, that makes the t-shirts I’ve got slightly redundant, otherwise known as collector’s items 
)
Other things:
I will try and post more little sketches of game artwork, so you can see
I may complete a couple of new achievement hunter videos soon, but I’ve been meaning too for a while, so the chances are sporadic at best.
Starting to consider putting witty (or at least attempts at being witty) articles on the site, probably video game related. It would give a bit more variety, at the moment it’s all just “cannon this” and “cannon that”, which I can’t even work on at the moment now anyway.
At the very least, hopefully it will be more in the region of 3 days, instead of 3 months, until I post again.
As always comments or suggestions are nice 
Please?
In the vein of posting anything I put on youtube onto the site as well, here is a video about making dominoes out of career guides:
I had another one planned too, but this is me we’re talking about, so it’s delayed for an unspecified length of time
As you know (unless this is your first time here, in which case: “look! a new guy!”) I have been working on (and failing to make progress on) an Xbox Live Indie game called “The Cannon”. Once finished, it will be mid-range on development time and price (240 points, if I haven’t said that before, look I made an announcement!). I know some people following this may also be interested in how you’d go about making such a game, so here are some of my own pointers. This is mostly aimed at people who plan to do at least all of the programming on my own. If not, there’s a huge amount of other pitfalls that are explained in my degree course
Plan the whole thing in advance
Technically, this isn’t possible for the WHOLE game, cool things will come into your head later down the line and other things may need to be changed in order to get them to work. However, you need to plan through how everything you’ve thought of should work within the game, because if you don’t, it won’t be nice when you hit that brick wall.
Also, take into account how big you want it to be. When I started, the price points were 200,400 and 800, I originally set out to make a very high quality 200 point game. As the price points have changed, I stick around that price point and go with 240 as that’s what I believe it’s worth. However, this leads me onto the next point…
Start small…maybe?
To start off, the smart thing is to make a neat little idea in the 80 points bracket. Of course, the service is flooded with cheap little games, so if you want to make something to publish, try to be original with your ideas. If you set out to make something relatively big straight away, the length of the project will probably start to drive you nuts *ahem*. I would say I’ve spent upwards of 500 hours working on “The Cannon”, so it’s down to you as to whether you really want to have that sort of work up ahead of you.
Can you draw?
Assuming you start off with a 2d game (although the same principles apply to 3d), you should tailor the graphics of your game around your drawing skills. I’m just about content in my drawing skills, but that’s only because the enemies are so small. If you want to have half decent graphics, but draw like a flipper handed freak child (to coin a phrase from Yahtzee), then find a friend or someone else on the internet who’s willing to help out. Of course, if you go on to sell the game, they might appreciate a small share if they’ve done the graphics.
The same goes for music, in fact the ideal (small) game production team is one coder, one artist and one musician.
What do I need?
Most important information can be found on the xna website: http://creators.xna.com/. Programs, tutorials, information, forums, all the basic stuff is there.
and that’s that for that wall of text. I’ll add anything else later if I think it’s necessary, or alternatively, feel free to ask anything else in the comments.
Finally I’ve been able to acquire some spare time in order to finish of the monkeys! This finishes off the major enemy sprites for the game!
Within the next couple of days, I’ll write up a little article about developing XNA games if anyone else is interested/ wants to know what sort of crazy things are going on inside my head. I need to do some bug fixes to the main game play and tweak the new enemies and hopefully I might have a better idea of what’s going on then, but I can’t really estimate how long things will take, especially when my free time is very variable. However, I will keep posting random stuff about it when I can, or pretty much anything else that might be of interest.
Well, as far as I can tell, the site just managed to fix itself, I hadn’t immeadiately done anything different, but I shouldn’t complain. Also, I’ve taken the oppurtunity to finally fix the link bar on the right. They should actually send you to the right places now…
I’d by lying if I’d said I’ve been able to make much progress on the game. There’s a lot of stuff I seem to be involved with at the moment. Celidh band, College table tennis and pool, university go-karting and somehow I’ve managed to rope myself into helping to write the college panto. Add this to all the uni work and I’m not left with much spare time.
On the other hand, the monkeys are almost finished, which will be a good step forwards. I may end up altering the current version of the game a bit so I can send it through playtest as it is to find any current bugs and see what people think of it at the moment, but that’s only a possibility.
I’ll keep you updated if anything does happen (or I’ll probably do so if nothing happens too), I need to get back into the swing of things a bit, i feel like I’ve had a wierd couple of weeks,