Since the success of the Mindmelter 360 project I’ve been thinking of another small scale game to create on the Xbox.
My idea is to do a version of Space Invaders with completly over the top modern graphics, post processing glow, ripple shockwave effects, huge solid polygon explosions (should be able to use the algo from racer).
This little fella to the left is the first draft of one of the 3 enemy models, I want to achive a slightly spooky yet thunderbirds like style with them.
He’s based off the ones on bottom two rows in the original game, there’s not much to go on with orginals being so low res but I’ve enjoyed extrapolating it out into my own vision.
on the weekend I came up with this idea for a tiny XBox 360 XNA project, tonight I managed to get the initial implementation working.
It’s basically an old school tunnel effect wrapped in an old school plasma effect covered with a new school post processing glow effect.
The clever parts are that the tunnel movement is all done in a vertex shader, the plasma is generated in a pixel shader and the palette for the plasma is dynamically re-calculated on the fly and passed in as a 1 dimensional texture.
The end result is a modern day Kaleidoscope, you can manipulate the palette and change the tunnels rotation and movement speed, it’s fun to muck around with colour!
Next job is to knock up an XBox project and fry my brain with colour on the big screen!
There’s been no extracurricular coding happening at the moment, I’ve been seriously burning myself out at work… I’m still at work writing these as a matter of fact.
Matt and I have been pairing up testing out the new Business object model with WPF design we’ve been working out recently, the most recent results are pictured below.
I’m really starting to understand this stuff now, the design is really quite gracefully and the code is looking very nice. It far outdoes anything I’ve written before. With any luck the bulk of it will be out of the way this week and I can take things a little easier, I can’t seem to help myself with learning new tech.
He’s based off the ones on bottom two rows in the original game, there’s not much to go on with orginals being so low res but I’ve enjoyed extrapolating it out into my own vision.
