That is a whole lot of missiles!
I can’t think of any more appropriate back-of-the-box quote than that for Itano Alpha Flight, my latest game on Xbox Live Indie Games. This game is all about missiles, yours and your enemies. It’s a little bit of Afterburner, a little bit of Macross, and a whole lot of action.
You can see screenshots of the game below:
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Okay, okay. I’m about two weeks late but I finally finished up my February #OneGameAMonth entry. In my defense, I did have a confluence of life and work events knock into my schedule. But, that’s neither here nor there. I said One Game a Month.
As I mentioned previously, my goal for February’s game was to capture some of that Itano Circus feel. With that in mind, I even went so far as to name the game “Itano Alpha Flight”. And now the game is available for you to play.
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Late last week, I finally managed to pass an update for Robot Legions out onto the Xbox Live Marketplace. I wasn’t originally planning to release an update this early (I have some other features in-the-works for the “real” next update), but… I had a bug. A nasty save data killing bug.
Yuck.
So, in the interest of helping other XNA devs out there, let me tell you about what I screwed up and how I fixed it. Continue reading
A while ago, I posted about pre-rendering text to improve runtime performance when using XNA SpriteFonts. Since then, I’ve managed to complete a game (Robot Legions, currently up for peer review) using my XNA codebase and got to try out my text pre-rendering solution in a real project. It worked out pretty well, but there were a few features that I wished I had implemented ahead of time. Well, while Robot Legions was being play-tested, I went ahead and implemented some of those features. Now I’ll describe those features and share a bit of (hopefully) helpful code that will let you use them in your own games. Continue reading
In last weeks post, I described how I used CLRProfiler to identify a couple parts of my code that were producing garbage every frame. One related to equality comparisons with my ActorState struct and another involving System.Objects being produced when I called RuntimePropertyInfo.SetValue(). This time, I’ll talk about what I did to fix those two problems. Continue reading
As cutesy as it may be, I’m growing rather fond of my garbage collection count display. I’m especially fond of it because it helped me find garbage collections occuring in places I never expected them to happen. Such as my title screen for example:
Ack! Look at all those garbage cans, I mean recycling bins (reduce, reuse, recycle, folks!)
That’s a lot of garbage collections for a “static” title screen. Now, how to find out what’s causing all that garbage to be created… That’s where Microsoft’s CLRProfiler comes into play. Continue reading
I’ve lamented before about how unfortunate it was that my frametime display allocated memory and would cause garbage collections to occur. Well, I found a simple solution for my memory allocation problem and, if I say so myself, it’s kind of… cute. Continue reading
In a previous post, I talked about how I added basic memory usage output to my frametime debug display. I also mentioned the major problem with that system being that the debug output I used allocated memory, causing garbage collections to occur. This constant change in memory usage naturally made the output hard to read. As I was writing that post, I had an idea for how I could easily solve that problem which I will share with you now. Continue reading
As I mentioned in a previous post, the number of milliseconds needed to render a frame is THE metric for measuring your game’s performance. Since then, I’ve tweaked the code I introduced in that article to further help me detect performance problems. Continue reading
While it’s the big problems in game programming that get all the press, there are plenty of small problems that show up day-to-day. Most of these problems can be solved by an equally small bit of code, it’s just a matter of figuring out what that code should be.
With that in mind, I’d like to share a few bits of utility code that I find invaluable in my daily game making. Continue reading