Tag: XNA

  • IGDA Ottawa: Indies in the Classroom Talk

    At a recent Independent Game Developers Association meeting I was asked to talk about my experiences taking Hideout!, a project originally developed as schoolwork, to the Xbox 360 for public sale. The slides and a video of the presentation are below. As always, please pass on any feedback; it’s always much appreciated! The presentation began…

  • Changing the Windows Mouse Cursor in XNA

    Background For anyone who is looking to develop a mouse-based game for Windows using the XNA framework, it’s pretty critical to be able to change your mouse cursor in game. The first method is to hide the mouse cursor and draw a custom texture in place of it – but anyone who is developing a…

  • Hideout! Post-mortem / Retrospective

    It’s been a few moths since the Xbox 360 release of Hideout! on the Indie Games channel of Xbox Live. The sales were very low, but I was expecting that from this type of game. Regardless, with over 1200 trial downloads and only 45 sales, it would be good to look at why this game…

  • Hideout! Downloads: First Four Days

    Hey Everyone! The “estimated” data for the first four days of downloads and sales for Hideout! are in! We’ve had over 1000 people try out the game, which definitely shows that people like the game box and marketing material! And 28 full game copies have been sold! To be honest, these are pretty much the…

  • Hideout! Now Available on Xbox Live!

    Hideout! has now been released on the Xbox 360! You can find it for download (with a free trial game) in the indie games section of the Xbox Live Marketplace or visit the game’s website at hideout.allenwp.com to watch the game trailer and find out more information. I had a tonne of fun making this…

  • 720p Title Safe GUI Template

    I am currently in the process of porting Hideout! to the Xbox 360 with XNA. As a part of this process, I needed to create a Photoshop GUI template for my GUI artist to ensure that our game would work well on all TVs. I thought this template may be useful to other developers as…

  • Simple, fast, GPU-driven multi-textured terrain

    In this article, I will be outlining the method of multi-textured terrain that I used in my recently completed XNA Real Time Strategy (RTS) project, Toy Factory. I have also expanded this tutorial to cover organic (blended) and deformed terrain. This method enables you to produce a similar result to Riemer’s XNA Tutorial on Multitexturing,…