Star Crisis is finally complete and awaiting peer review in the XNA forums. In real world terms, it's been a total 6 months since I began the project -- although development actually only took about 12 weeks of work. From a man-hours perspective, then, I'm pleased that I managed to keep the dev cycle down to a mere 3 months. (Aesop's Garden was an entire 9 months of fairly focused development!)
There are so many game ideas I want to explore next, but I do have a very definite plan for my next effort. Here's what's coming up next for Excalibur Studios:
- First, I'm going to update my XNA flixel port to the latest version of the flixel framework. It will also be targeted toward XNA 4.0 and the Reach profile so that it can be used for Windows Phone development.
- Second, I've already got a game prototyped for the Windows Phone 7, so my gamedev time will be spent on getting it up to snuff for a full release on the phone marketplace.
Updates to this blog probably won't be quite as frequent until the X-flixel update is complete and I'm back to writing games.
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After two months of silence, I suppose it would be a good idea to provide a small update as far as Star Crisis goes.
As it turns out, my first kid will be arriving in early September, and my house was in no condition to take in another person. So I've been busy finishing my basement so that all my computer equipment can be moved downstairs.
Needless to say, all this housework has wreaked havoc on my ability to create games, or even do much of anything videogame-related.
Anyway, I'm now working slowly through the last few items on my todo list for Star Crisis, and maybe someday soon I will have a finished product to show for it. 
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So, I'll start off by saying that I finished Star Crisis this weekend. All the levels done, the bosses complete, Endless Mode fully endless, etc.
I polished up a handful of minor issues, then sat back and thought, "Wow. That's it. I'm done."
But one last playtester comment from the XNA forums has been bouncing around in my head for nearly a month now, and in spite of my attempts to ignore it, it just wouldn't go away:
"Multiplayer would be awesome!"
"All right," I thought, "I'll just mess around a bit and see what it would take to add a second player." Less than an hour later, Star Crisis was suddenly a multiplayer game:
Yes, the second player was pathetically simple to add to mix. I'll still need to revamp the scoring system, since that's the one piece that completely relied on single-player action. (I want the players' scores to be separate rather than combined.)
I'd like to remind the reader that after reaching my original 6-week milestone, I estimated about 6 weeks' more effort to come out with a completed game. It ended up taking only 5, but this multiplayer deal will round out that final week, and after that, it's time for one last playtest.
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After spending a fruitful week in playtest, I had an awful lot of feedback to go over. My to-do list ballooned to over a dozen items, some of which would completely change the way the game played.
Some of the suggestions were simple enough: the game needs an "easy" mode, the bullets are too hard to dodge, it's not obvious enough when the player takes damage, etc.
However, one piece of feedback, requiring only 9 lines of code to implement, would completely change the way the game plays: playtesters wanted the ability to move horizontally.
As it turned out, horizontal movement was the first suggestion I tackled due to its coding simplicity. I noticed instantly that it makes the game quite a bit easier. That's not necessarily a bad thing (and it meant that I could make Hard Mode more difficult).
Overall, however, I decided that four-directional movement makes Star Crisis more enjoyable, because it makes you feel more "in control." As a result, the new ability is here to stay.
In spite of the mountain of feedback I received in playtest, I was able to implement most of the desired changes in the space of a week -- meaning I've not lost much time. That's a terrific tradeoff for making my game better.
Easy, Normal, and Hard Modes are all in the game now, with only the final boss needing further difficulty tweaks. After that, I still have Endless Mode to complete.
After that? Well, it'll probably be just about release time.
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Star Crisis is back in playtest after a fairly long hiatus. The changes are pretty extensive, and things are finally wrapping up with development.
This weekend was one of my most productive in a while, and I used most of it to design and implement the behavior of the final boss in the game. I also needed a "final confrontation" sort of tune for this conflict, but my dev budget is pretty much shot at this point, so I turned to the generosity of Kevin MacLeod, whose web site happened to have a suitable piece.
At this point, my todo list is short:
- Hard Mode for levels 3-4
- Final boss for Hard Mode
- Finish Endless Mode
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