Long time no update

Hi folks,

I thought I should share the progress of the game with you. I had a lot of other things to do lately, but I started working on this game again some days ago.

So here is what I got für the Title Menu Screen.

Buildings

I did some more work on ingame graphics to test new features etc.
I made new classes for buildings and some other stuff. The buildings will act like spawnpoints for your units and are upgradeable. The screenshot just shows some building without any sense or logic. They are in the screen just for eyecandy purposes to show what I can already do with the few assets I already built.

I started adding editor functionality to the XNA Game itself (I used to build a seperate editor in the past, but I don't want to develop two seperate programs anymore) and the shown scene is completely built with the editor functions while the last screen was created using randomized values.

All in all progress comes along nicely.

Standard classes for game decoration

I finished some classes for vegetation, trees and some other new stuff.

I arranged the map in virtual areas which enables me to only update/draw things that are necessary for an actor on the map. This gave a very nice speed boost! Right now I can run the "game" on the XBox 360 with about 10000 game objects until it starts to jitter a bit. But in the end I guess I will only need a few hundred objects to make a nice looking map.
All the plants on the screen are animated (weaving a bit). I think I will make a first video when I have some more things done.

Right now I just wanted to show you the progress, because I think it all comes along very nice:

First characters animated

I finished the first essential animations for the characters to be able to create the basic character classes. The srceenshot shows the graphical quality I am aiming (the characters, the ground is just plain grass at the moment :) ).

Stay tuned!

Blog created

Yeah, finally I decided to create a blog for my new project Heroes & Villains.

Since the XBox Live Indie Games are available in germany now, I decided to focus on XNA games in the near future.
My next game will be a genre mix that includes elements from

- Realtime strategy
- Roleplaying game
- Tower defense

The combination of these genres is a cool challenge in game design. I hope I will get everything together in a way that the game is fun and challenging at once.

I will get more into detail while I show progress here. Its always a bad idea to spill the beans about a game idea before there is anything playable.

Here are some infos I can spit out anyway:
- The game will be written in C# using the XNA Game Studio 3.1 from Microsoft.
- Graphics are done in 2D. I will prerender everything.
- The game will support Windows PC's and the XBox360.
- I want to bring in multiplayer gaming, but I need to think about it in details later on.
- The player should be able to chose the side he wants to play (heroes or villains)

Enough for now.
I need to work on the character animations again.

Stay tuned!