I was surprised that I got everything done today that I wanted to. I made tapping the screen shoot the gun, complete with muzzle flash and kickback animation. A puff of smoke will appear in the air in the direction you are facing. The smoke fades away, but before it does you can rotate your view and see the smoke hanging in the air around you. It ended up looking pretty good, so I tried to make a video for this update.

Spike Attack

All that is left for this challenge is
- make enemies fly around
- make enemies killable
- make enemies attack you
- health meter
- sounds/music
Should be possible to actually complete this thing.

Well, I almost met my goal of having the entire UI done. A lot of my artwork is not great but I suppose I will replace it when this challenge is over and I have more time. I added a cool animated reticle that I kind of lifted the idea of from terminator. Too bad I can’t show the animation yet. Also created a crappy gun model and have that rendering, though it doesn’t follow the camera movement exactly.

The aiming reticle moves up and down based on the phone being tilted, and the gun and gridlines move according to the direction the player is pointing the phone. The internal compass still is really hard to work with, but I have a few more ideas to try out.

Tommorrow should be all about making the gun shoot.

By the end of day three, I want to have the entire user input and UI rendering done, so I think I’m still on track. I spent a lot of time getting fiddly little bits of WP7 framework in place, and building the 3d rendering methods. It doesn’t look like much but I currently have the game scene rendering onto a cylinder wrapped around the player. You can see this in the screenshot.

A lot of time was spent fighting the compass which is super twitchy and jumpy. In order to have the game scene not twitch and jump along with the compass, I have it slowly chase the compass heading at a smoother pace, but it still likes to freak out now and then and spin wildly. The compass accuracy will suddenly turn to crap for a second or too, which is the problem.

So as of tonight I’m rendering the game scene around the player and the scene will rotate as the player rotates his phone to look around.

I had to roll my own screenshot ability for the Windows Phone since it really hates to do screenshots. Here, then, is a real image of progress so far. The [SS] button in the corner takes the screenshot and saves it to the Camera Album so Zune can sync it to my computer.

Day one – I completed everything I wanted to get done:

• Access the camera and display the images
• Draw XNA output overtop of the camera image
• Access the compass and determine the phone orientation
• Basic framework

The biggest problem I ran into is that it is next to impossible to get a screenshot from the phone. This app doesn’t run properly in the phone emulator since the emulator has no camera and no compass. Two screenshot apps I tried either didn’t work for XNA apps, or required a jailbreaked phone.

I ended up taking a picture of my phone with a camera, which sucks. I will have to work on saving a texture dump of the primary surface to a file myself, if its possible.

Tommorrow I will be comtinuing the rendering engine that overlays XNA on the video feed.

The red blur here is an XNA bouncing box drawn over the camera feed.