Basalt

It’s been around two weeks since my last post. Basically because I’ve been busy porting my engine Basalt to iPhone/iPad. If you follow me on twitter you might have known this already since I ranted pretty much at start, moving platform and language is always painful if you are used to other conventions/shortcuts etc. So it all started with my wish to port Vizati to the iPhone, since the game is already running on PC, Xbox360 and Windows Phone 7 one can only wish for an easy and quick port since pretty much all base code is done. ...

Like some of you already know I’m currently out of job, the company where I worked like many out there closed due to, I don’t know, financial issues, bad management, who knows. Even worse the news got out just before Christmas and it was not the holidays I intended to have. Times have been hard, since the last pay check I got was in November. I worked there since 2006, almost 4 years, I joined the team back then in the hopes of joining something in the games industry. It was funny, built a couple of games, made part of big projects, learned much, learned that even more is to be learned. One year after I started making small prototype games on my free times as a joke and websites now and then for a couple of extra bucks. ...

Lately all my free time has been spent adding new features to Basalt and developing Sapphire. Some months ago, I started building Sapphire, a 2D editor for helping me creating to create my maps. Unfortunately I made a bad choice and decided to integrate XNA with Windows Forms, although I managed to do it it was a real pain to add something simple and eventually I dropped it. Here’s a screenshot of the previous alpha version: ...

Although the title says XNA log file this is actually a C# log file, I’ve just thrown this title cause lot’s of people search for xna log instead of C# log file. Many have asked me why take time to do a log file when you can throw exceptions when something goes wrong. Well the answer is simple, to keep track of what’s happening, log steps, write to the file exactly what when wrong even if you are on Release mode, and more, if someone complains the game is crashing you simply ask for the log file and see what when wrong. ...

I decided to make a game for the xna7day competition, in which we have to make a game that only uses 2 keys, so absolutely no analog input and it has to be built on xna of course. This is a great opportunity to test my engine Basalt. I decided to make a puzzle game, basically the rules are the same of a 3 in line game. This is what I have so far. ...

07/01/2011 – By popular request updated to XNA 4.0, xna 3.1 code is still there too One of the things I keep finding is people asking how to do a simple camera 2d in XNA. Today I decided to contribute with my own solution. Most of the time the solution given is to have a class camera with a Vector2 position and when drawing the sprite batch to subtract the camera position to the sprite position itself. Although this work from my point of view it’s not elegant and you can’t have neat features like zooming and rotation. So for my tutorial I’ll do all transformations using a Matrix. Start off by creating the basic class Camera2d ...

So I’ve been working on a sort of media player in order to play movies on my 2d engine Basalt made on top of XNA. By extending my class Object2d I manage to get this pretty cool result. You can even apply shaders to it. Since I extended the class from Object2d I can rotate, scale and set a position to the video besides regular options like play/pause, fullscreen etc. For those who don’t know the video playing is a chunk of the series Naruto Shippuuden ...

I decided to take the morning to make a small sprite sheet editor for our Xna engine. This way the artist can easily define the sprite areas and their origin saving in a file that can later on be loaded on the engine. Not very fancy yet but it gets the job done. Next step will be making an animator editor.

Lately whenever I’m off work and I have the time I’ve been working on a 2d Engine in XNA. We named it Basalt. Cool hum? lol I have almost everything done, since sprites, to sprite animations, scenes, layers, resolution independent engine, game state and a lot of other cool things. On a recent post I’ve showed a 4 split screen prototype, that was made in Basalt. Also I’ve been working, even though on a slower pace on Shappire, the editor and a sprite sheet editor, for the animations etc. ...

Hello there. Yes i know I haven’t updated in awhile, I’ve been really busy. So the deadline for Dream Build Play is 5 days from now and up till yesterday I haven’t made anything. My goal was to have a prototype by now to submit to DBP, but I ain’t got anything. So today I decided to see what I could do from scratch, and not related to the main idea that Rita and I have for the game we should have submitted. ...