J. Poulakos II Blog

[Live Lecture]

It’s that time again folks! Lectures about programming featuring me. This Thursday, 11/13/2008, I will be having a live lecture at 7pm CST. If you’d like to participate, please contact me either here, or via email at admin@redsatori.com. I will need your email address in order to send the DimDim link to you. I start promptly at 7pm CST, although I will be there a bit earlier than that.

Additionally, please check this post again for additions to the session. I will include some assets for you to use in your own follow-along projects, or you can use them elsewhere. They most likely won’t be anything special as I am not a graphic artist, just a programmer.

If you plan on participating, please be aware that I tend to go through the content of the session pretty quickly. I don’t do this on purpose, but have a tendency to be doing about 500 things at any given time. Also, please make sure you have a working copy of Visual Studio and also XNA. You can use VS 2005 with XNA 2.0 or you can use VS 2008 with XNA 3.0 CTP (I use the latter), and they should work fairly similarly. I will double check some of my code in XNA 2.0 once I get a chance to get my desktop back up and running.

[VSDD]

This very simple design document contains the information about the project we will be working with during the live session.

Name: Bomb Guys

Objective: Objective is to not allow any bomb guys to reach your base.

Gameplay: Mouse controls the aiming reticule. Left mouse button fires.

Other things to work on: Text Rendering Engine, Particle Engine, Animation Engine (for bomb guys)

[Conclusion]

Thanks for wanting to be a part of this process. Again, if you’d like to join the session either email me at the address listed above or post it in the comments section here. Please make sure you let me know if you are  a DeVry student or a random passerby.

Thanks,

~Jim

Sorry about the delay in getting tutorials posted here on my blog. I am hoping to get back into posting new content in the next week or so. I will be unavailable the week of November 18th, as Mines of Moria is being released that day and I really want to take a look at the new content.

That being said, I will be making a tutorial on creating 2D game utilities in the upcoming month or so. It will be a side-scrolling based engine that I will be creating which will allow multi-part animations and a basic scripting language for this type of game. Additionally, I will be posting tutorials on a simple particle engine, a cursor engine, and a couple of other graphical engines that may be of use to some of you. At the very least, you can see how the code works in order to develop your own strategies.

Stay tuned for more information.

~Jim

P.S. I am also hoping to get a video podcast on here about some of what I am going to be doing as well. I don’t know how long that is going to take, but hopefully not too long.