Updates about Different Pixel and Sapphire

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. ...

December 30, 2009 · 3 min · 433 words · David Amador

Basalt and Sapphire Updates

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: ...

December 2, 2009 · 2 min · 245 words · David Amador

Building an 2D Game Engine in XNA - Part 1

I decided to starting writing a series of tutorials for building an 2d XNA game engine. Keep in mind that while the main focus is 2d nothing prevents us from adding the 3d stuff later but for now we will stick to 2D. It’s not very original but I’ll call this the Bay Engine. If anyone else has a better idea let me know. Requirements: You must have some Object Oriented Programming background to full understand what we will do here. XNA 3.1 Visual C# Express or Professional 2008 This is it for the first part. It just covers the basic structure, next week I’ll talk about objects2d, scene and screens management. ...

October 16, 2009 · 1 min · 112 words · David Amador

XNA Camera 2d with zoom and rotation

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 ...

October 12, 2009 · 3 min · 433 words · David Amador

Basalt gains a media player

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 ...

October 4, 2009 · 1 min · 86 words · David Amador

XNA Sprite Sheet

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.

August 23, 2009 · 1 min · 61 words · David Amador

Pugna prototype

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. ...

August 1, 2009 · 1 min · 212 words · David Amador

Tech Talk: Linus Torvalds On Git

I recently found that there is a subversion alternative surfacing that is in many ways much better that subversion, it name is Git and it’s a creation of Linus Torvalds. Here’s a video of him talking about it

February 3, 2009 · 1 min · 38 words · David Amador