With the announcement that Microsoft are going to sell the XNA community games over XBox live I figure it’s time to reveal the super secret skunkworks XNA project I’ve been working on.

Up to 1 to 4 player split screen, co-op or competitive cart action on XBox or PC. Most of the graphics are just place holders at the moment, but I’ve got some pretty good tech going on in the shaders that open the door to some game play ideas.

Every object in the game can:

• Be animated by one of many vertex shader routines.
• Have the amplitude and frequency of this animation individually controlled.
• Have it’s a colour saturation manipulated (from grey scale to colour).
• Mask out areas of the texture to a colour (ie specific parts can change colour).

Game modes I want to include:

• Paint the town, where everything starts gray scale and you have to paint the level with your Dirchies colour (maybe have a specific colour that you have to collect first).
• Race…standard Kart affair but with more bad guys.
• Battle, you need to keep your Dirchie meter above zero (Dirchie meter indicated to other players by your saturation level)
• Survival, help each other reach the end of a level filled with bad guys.
• DDR, Dirchie Dance Revolution, something where you collect notes or something that make the level dance… I dunno.

The other thing I want to introduce is a award/punishment/vote system so you can bag each other out at the end of each round.

If you’ve got any suggestions for game modes, weapons or awards/punishments leave me a comment.