I finally got around to finishing up some lose ends such as:
- actual main page artwork and better titles, popups etc
- 3d sound so you can hear where the enemy is charging up
- help and about page
- number of enemies slider
- better UV placement on the electric charge
- properly handling tombstoneing
- trial mode
- enemies don’t get stuck never shooting

I also submitted the game to Microsoft so hopefully it will be in the marketplace soon. It got an ESRB rating of E10+ due to fantasy violence. :p

I added a trial mode so that people can get the game for free. Trial version is exactly the same as the paid version, but please get the paid version if you like to support my efforts!

In the future I would probably add things like scoring, and a variety of enemies like a birds that flap wings, and spiders that run at you on the ground, and more ways to defend yourself. Most likely this is the end, and I’m on to bigger and better things.

Hey guys – I’m up super late to finish Spike Attack because I won’t have any time tommorrow, due to my real job and stuff. Everything ended up exactly as planned. I’m pretty glad that my original idea ended up taking me exactly 7 evenings to do.

Things that I added for the final version:
- Fixed the damned compass so its smooth and playable now
- Added an enemy that has apassive mode and an attack mode. It randomly jets around you in a circle, rnadomly changing speed, direction. It has to stop to shoot, and thats a good time to get it!
- Enemies take about 3 seconds to charge up. If you hit them in that time, they go passive again. When they shoot you lose a heart.
- Charging up enemies covered in an electric shell. You are also, when you get hit.
- Sound effects.
- Other small bugs.

Pics!
#1 – a passive enemy
#2 – a charging up enemy. Spikes!
#3 – its not a well balanced game so you die a lot

I am uploading the XAP file for other WP7 devs to install and check it out.
If you arent a dev, and have a WP7, look for it in the Marketplace for free. I’m not sure how long it will take to get in there.

Update: I have released the source code for Spike Attack

Spike Attack is going pretty good – its only missing the spikey thing that attacks you. Yesterday I had to take one night to refactor code into less of a single massive messy class. Today I added an animated health meter, a particle effect for shots that hit the target and added a basic enemy that orbits you. You can spin around with the phone and follow the enemy as it orbits you. Don’t get dizzy!

Also added some sound effects. Having to make all my own art, sounds and models is fun but really time consuming even though there isn’t much.

Also also, had an idea to make a desktop version of the game using arrow keys instead of the compass and replacing the camera view with some panoramic landscape , but I doubt that will get done by the deadline. So all none of you with Windows Phones will be the only ones to see it

Here is a pic so far:

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.