Mach X Games Blog

Wow, several days without a post. I can’t start slacking now!

I think I’ve come to a decision about developing the spy game, at least for the initial proof-of-concept. I’m going with XNA and a minimal graphic set. I’m talking programmer art that makes programmer art look good here since I’m highly graphically challenged and I’m not about to put out money for something like this. If everything pans out I’ll move to Hero Cloud and pay someone for content.

I’ve actually been fiddling around with some things. I’ve got a solution started already and some bits working:

Probably not the best way to organize things, but for the “let’s see how this works” type project I can probably get away with it. I’ll probably separate out the tools from the game from the server at some point.

So I’ve got a basic server project that is just a plain Windows Forms project with a textbox and a couple of buttons:

it’s basically just the server code from the XNA Game sample in Lidgren dropped into a WinForms project. I didn’t mention that I was using Lidgren for the networking code, did I. I guess I did now. It’s probably the best codebase out there for a PC XNA project, since you can’t use the Live networking piece in XNA when doing a PC game.

I threw together a quick SQL Server database for holding some of the data that’s going to be needed. At this point it’s just a couple of tables that holds game version info for the patcher application and a Users table for validating logins.

I’ll be adding some tables for holding basic players’ character information to allow the player to select the character in the character selection screen. This won’t be like most MMOs where the player can have several characters going at once, but since we need to maintain historical information for players the one-to-many player-to-character links have to be done and it’s nice to show the player what the character’s current status is before just dumping him into the game.

On the client side I have some basic screens – splash screen, login screen, the aforementioned character selection screen, and the main game screen. I’m using the Gamestate Management Sample of course.

Once the character selection screen is finished, I’ll need to do some work on the game library and tools. That’ll probably take a couple of days and it’s the most fun type game code to write but it’s vital.

I’ve an idea for another post that should come quickly after this so be prepared!