Zelda

I've got to say that I really enjoy playing Zelda! And I'm not talking about the newer games, since I haven't yet had the chance to play them, but I'm talking about the good old sprite based Zeldas. I'm currently playing "The Minish Cap" (not that old but retro anyway) which is a beatiful upgrade of the Zelda 3 look and feel, even though they could have added a couple of hours work on the story. But that's not why I'm playing zelda. It's because of the simple arcade style combined with the terrain/item puzzles. I like them so much that I suspect I'll add something like it in Soulreaper. I've been thinking about clever ways to temporarily block off areas and Zelda has got a lot of them.

After deciding to go for a simplistic level-up system and simple items as well, I'm suspecting this might be a good way to get the game a bit more interesting. Certain areas of each level might be locked so coming back later will reward you. Perhaps you'll get an item or even a sub quest. Depending on how complicated the level generation algorithm is going to be, these sub quests could either be locked to that level or they could contain different parts in different levels. It's of course important to make sure the level generator doesn't cause a deadlock situation where you need A to get to B, but you need B to get to A.

In Zelda you either get items or upgrades to get to new areas. I'm expecting upgrades might be the best way to handle this in Soulreaper because of the simple item system. You could for instance get new skills by being trained by a mentor, helping a demon or perhaps sucking the soul from a seraph.

Most important computer related inventions

This is more of a note to self than a blog entry - Remember to read this at work tomorrow!

Members of the Soulreaper team

After the previous post about Soulreaper, a member of the team got a bit offended since he wasn't mentioned, so here's a full blog entry just for him ;). The way things are organized now, we're basically three people active on the team: Michael, Me and Niklas - two coders and one muse. He's up for nerdy game discussions whenever he's online and he has already brought a lot of fresh ideas to this projects, so a big up for him ;)

Self defence

Every woman should have this as rape prevention. Just fiddle his balls and voila.

Soulreaper

As some of you might have noticed, I've put up a project section in the menu. I'm planning to put links to all my current projects there - at least those who have got some information online.

The first project I've put up is Soulreaper - an arcade rpg in progress. We're currently two programmers, one story/quest designer and a musician on the team. I'm planning on being a bit more structured with this project than earlier ones so we've set up a wiki, bug tracking system and a source repository. There's not that much information in the wiki yet, but I'll add a bit whenever I can.

Extreme Multiprogramming

I just found these notes from some sort of lecture on multiprocessing. I'm most interested in the notes about the Cell and of course the 360!

The Xbox 360 Dissected

I just found this page which I'm reading for breakfast. It should bring me up to date on the 360 hardware.

Edit: I found out that it was a bit outdated after I wrote this, but it was interesting reading none the less.

I'm currently trying to come up with the core engine design for the current game I'm working on with a friend of mine. Multithreading is the way to go if you've got processing needs - and even though our first game is a sprite based arcade game, it doesn't hurt to plan ahead. If all goes well we're planning on using the same core engine for other games, so it has to be able to scale up.

Check this out:
Coding For Multiple Cores on Xbox 360 and Microsoft Windows

XNA and Video Safe Area

I just realized something. Coding for the 360 and PC at the same time isn't only sweet - as I've just realized when remembering that there's something called safe area in TV editing. Here's a simple way to display these areas - and now to find a good way to handle them both on PCs and TVs. I guess I'll bring the notion of safe areas into my base canvas class, which is a wrapper class around the direct3d device I'm planning on designing to reduce the amount of re-coding basic gfx stuff.