INTERVIEW TO THE TEAM BEHIND "TOWER DEFENSE"

Zygote has interviewd the guys behind the game "Tower Defense".

From the interview: "... There are four of us currently under the Focused Games umbrella. Justin O'Dell (Anxiety), has been taking care of a lot of the core gameplay functionality such as how the map works and how state, player and enemy management works. Matthew Randall (EviLDeD) wrote the entire audio core for the game, and also did quite a bit of work with Towers and Enemies to get them to track, shoot, move et cetera. Mart Slot is the one responsible for all the fancy particle effects in the game, which will be more prominent in the future. I, John Sedlak (Krisc), have been responsible for the user interface and a lot of the front end work like how the user interacts with the map, how they change levels, and build towers ...".

Later.

DEALING WITH MATRICES IN XNA

Rhysyngsun has submitted to Ziggyware the article: "Introduction to Matrices in XNA".

From the article: "... Understanding matrices is a fundamental part of creating effective games in XNA. Matrices particularly flex their muscle when you're working in full 3D space, however, the math behind them can be daunting. Fortunately, XNA provides most of the functionality for matrices that you will ever need without having to worry about the complicated math behind that functionality. However, it is necessary to have an understanding of what this functionality is actually doing in order to apply it correctly in your code ...".

Watch this space!

QUATERNION CAMERA IN XNA

Scot Boyd, author of the upcoming book "Expert One on One: XNA Game Programming for Xbox 360 and Windows", has provided the source code of the "QuaternionCamera" class which will help you avoid that nasty Gimbal Lock problem that you may face when working with yaw, pitch and roll at a time.

From the post: "... XNA unfortunately does not provide a QuaternionCamera class in it's Framework. Nowhere on the Internet could I find a camera class that provides six degrees of freedom without requiring additional coding from the reader ... In the process of attacking this problem in my book, I've made a few camera classes. I'm posting the simplest class here - good for beginners. The final camera class in the book will be more complicated. This class should provide a good jumping-off point for anybody interested, or a simple helper class for those who just want a camera without hassles. In the camera, GetViewMatrix and CreateYawPitchRoll are where the money is ...".

Read on!

"KRYSALIS" SHOOTER PROJECT

There's a new blogger in the XNA community, which will post details, information and screenshots of the shooter projectKrysalis.

Here you will find some description of the game and here the software being used for its development.

Also, there's a couple of screenshots of the custom tools created for building up the game.

Nice!

FIVE THINGS TO REMEMBER

Head to Kar0nEs blog if you want to know the "5 Things we can learn as developers from videogames".

From the article: "... Yesterday, while travelling to work, I thought about what things PC videogames (almost) always do today that should be applied to general development ...".

Stay tuned!

TABBING BETWEEN CONTROLS ...

... is what you'll see in the video available below, which shows off some GUI features of the upcoming Thrust engine.

From the post: "... Below is a short video clip of me testing out GUI Pathing in Thrust ... I can't wait to see what people come up when using this. In the demo, I am simply tabbing between the controls. It will work much the same with the XBOX 360 GamePad, allowing a user to "tab" to the next menu option, et cetera ...".

Bye.

XNB-VIEWER ... WHAT IS IT?

Shane Lynch has released the first version of XNB-Viewer, a handy application that lets you preview an XNB model with a double-click of your mouse.

From the post: "... You can either drag and drop your XNB model files onto the exe or associate your XNB files with this EXE. Later version of this viewer will support for textures, shaders and other content types ...".

Enjoy!