Sapphire

Holy cow, this is my 100th post. “Insert epic sentence” Depending on how much time you follow my blog or Different Pixel activity you may know that we have an internal Editor called Sapphire Past It was developed over a year ago with the intent of being a “All in one” 2D game editor for our games, built on XNA. It started out pretty well and I’m very happy with the outcome. It served it’s purpose. The problem now is, most of the stuff we need, apart from the generic sprites positioning, rotation etc, are very specific stuff to the game/project in hands. ...

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: ...

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. ...