Managed World

Well, today was my second day in XNA land working on Stones (my Bejeweled clone and my first XNA game (and also a subtle play off of Jason Mauer's Bouncing Balls demo)). Once this game is finished, I'll be using it as a vehicle to do a series of game development screencasts on XNA (most likely it will also be in tutorial form that will be included with the video in the download).

I'm still just psyched how good XNA is. Maybe once I come down from "Cloud 9," I'll be able to come up with some constructive criticism. But until then, I'm going to just enjoy the ride. So, here's what Stones looks like today after Day 2:

I have navigation between the Title Screen and the Play Screen working. Of course, that only took all of about two minutes. Above, you can see the play screen. That's a generic background image I'm drawing (I just grabbed it out of my Sample Pictures directory). The playing grid you see is actually a superimposed texture using alpha blending. The playing grid image is actually shades of gray so that I can tint it according to the color pallette of the background image.

Next, I'm going to make some stone images and see what they look like with the board filled up. After that, I will make PlayingField a GameComponent that I can simply add to the GameComponentCollection that I have encapsulated in the TitleScreen. Once the PlayingField is finished, I'll move on to the business rules and scoring. When tackling the scoring system, I'll probably also tackle what the scoreboard looks like there on the left.

 The "Play Screen" text you see on the screen is actually being displayed by a VisualDebuggerComponent that I have built. The VisualDebuggerComponent publishes a IVisualDebuggerService that can be pulled and used anywhere in the game using Game.GameServices.GetService(). Eventually, I plan on extending the VisualDebugger to include a debugging console that will drop down from the top that can be used for debug logging as well as actual visual debugging of things like bounding box visualization and stuff like that. It should be pretty cool :).

Of course, all these components and such I'm building into a Harvest Game Library that I'm building. Currently, Harvest Game Library will mostly be for my personal use as I build several games, but I'm hoping to release it in the future so everyone can enjoy it.

Now I can't wait until tomorrow night when I get to work on it again :).