XNA UK User Group

Hey there everyone,

It's been a while since I've been on here, partly due to forgetting my password and partly due to being busy making another game! But I'm back now and I'd like to share with you our efforts over the last 3 months. This project started out as a challenge to ourselves to make something simple and actually finish it after having started a few other ideas that got too complicated and out of hand. We heard about DBP and signed up just so we could get the free 12 month subscription to Creators club but we'd just started this project and thought that it would give us a nice time scale to try and do it in. Heres the (rather hastily made) gameplay vid we submitted for the entry. (sorry for the lack of screenshots I haven't got any hosted anywhere yet but I'll try get some up soon).

http://video.msn.com/video.aspx?vid=4783b457-9d6d-44fc-aa91-df4d9b024456

The idea was inspired by a freeware game I used to play with my little bro way back in '98 called Jump n' Bump. We wanted to recreate the simplistic and fun elements of this game but add our own twist to it in the process. While we didn't get a chance to do as much of the twisting as we wanted in time for the competition, we're really happy with where got to and are looking forward to taking it a bit further and getting it somewhere near what we envisioned in the future. That'll be after a bit of a break though! Myself and Dan have been holding full-time jobs down throughout the whole development and have had our fair share of late nights and early mornings these past few months!

I checked the competition rules and couldn't find anything about doing this, but we wanted to share it with you guys and get as much feedback as possible. It's not too different from us getting our mates to test it anyway so I can't see it being a problem, we should have done this a lot earlier to be honest, but you live and learn! You'll need a creators club membership to play it, but hopefully we will have a PC version up sometime soon as well.

Download the .cc here: http://www.cg-art.co.uk/store/sumosquash-xbox360.zip  (98 mb)

Then get a few mates round and start Squashing!

I'm considering writing up some posts on my blog with some early shots and how the game developed so I'll post a link if I get round to doing that.

Cheers,

Gaz.

Looks great fun!! Alas, I have no friends..... but will download it and have a go....may rope a neighbor in to play.... :(

Sorry in my tiredness I forgot to mention and thank everyone who had a hand in this. They are:

Gareth Clarke (myself): game design/character design/animation/fx

Daniel Jeffery: game design/code/some more code stuff/a little bit more coding

Dave Faulkner: game design/level design/background and level art/fx

Rob Faulkner: sound fx/music

Also big thanks to Aaron MacDougall for his part in the co-development of the Agro 2D engine on which the game is based, and also to Matt for his Project Mercury particle system which we used.

 Cheers Guys!

Don't worry Krad, we struggled to get people to test and play in real life too! That's what happens when your team is spread across the country. :(

We were going to implement network play to get round this, but it soon became clear we had left that too late!

Man I love Jump n' bump - one of the greatest freeware games ever (  behind liero and tapan kaikki of course :P  )

I have to say the artwork looks awesome in this - I wish I had someone who could draw so well, I end up having to use really complicated effects that kill the cpu to make anything look remotely decent.

I can't comment on the gameplay as I don't have a 360, but one thing I would say is, why so little gore?  Part of the appeal of jump n' bump was the hilariously excessive amount of blood and guts tumbling down when jumping on the cute bunnies.  Maybe it wouldn't be so funny with human sumo wrestlers...

Hey Duncan,

The gore was one of things that got forgotten about while we were trying to get all the rest of it together to be honest. It works but it's definitely not how I intended it.

We did however have a slightly more gory version up until the Sunday before deadline which had a 2D metaball effect on it and was a lot more 'goopy', but because of the camera it would look really jittery while zooming/moving and would de-sync at the slightest frame drop. So in the end we just took it off and were left with the underlying particle effect sans metaballs effect.

It's definitely on my list of tweaks and stuff to do on this! Thanks for calling it out though, sometimes it's too easy to think 'ok that'll do' and move on!