Game Studio Express

Again it has been too long since I posted. I really need to work on this whole weekly posting thing. I’ve been playing around with Game Studio Express for a few days and am impressed. I think Microsoft will get what they are looking for, a lot of good fan games on the 360.

It is very easy to pick up and just use. The content pipeline is especially easy, which is probably my favorite part. I usually spend a few weeks setting up content pipelines on hobby projects only to work on the actual project for just few days. Frequently the content problem has been enough to make me not work on a side project. With Game Studio Express I just dropped in my content and it just worked.

Extending it has been a breeze so far. I wanted to add camera frustum culling, so I went about setting up the math only to discover they had all the frustum math code already made. I just needed to set it up in my camera class and call it. Most features I wanted to add have been this way, the base code was already written and I just needed to put it into my framework.

The biggest hurdle has been learning C# which actually is not that big a deal. The IDE is very helpful in this regard, almost keeping me from doing anything illegal. Finding how to do certain tasks could have been made easier, but I should probably buy a book for that anyway.

So I have quickly set up a 3D tile map editor:

I think I am going to do a simple dungeon running game with it. Not 100% sure at this point. I need to see if there is a C# physics package floating around to hook up to this.

I also need to figure out how to do my characters for this. I’m not really capable of modeling them myself so I may need to do something 2D.