WaaghMan interviewed on XBLARatings
The XBLA and XNA review site XBLARatings has interviewed WaaghMan as the main developer of Little Racers. The article is available on their website.
The XBLA and XNA review site XBLARatings has interviewed WaaghMan as the main developer of Little Racers. The article is available on their website.
Despite being released on Thursday, Little Racers has sold enough copies to reach the Top 10 of Community Games sales last week(9th position).
As an additional note, it’s the only one in the Top10 that’s being sold at 400 MP , so that’s a double success. We’re grateful to everyone that tried and bought the game. And for those who bought it but experienced some problems, don’t worry, we’re working on it right now to deliver the first patch, with Online mode being the main improvement.
In the few days that have passed since Little Racers is on the store, some people has asked us about its soundtrack. So we’ve packed it up with some nice cover art and here it is:
Download Little Racers Soundtrack
Hope you like it as much as we do!
After some days available, we’ve received some feedback from users regarding what can be improved to make Little Racers a better game.
The main suggestion we’ve got is an online mode. During the development of the product, we decided to focus on the local multiplayer mode to ensure a good final product quality, since networking is a difficult and lengthy task.
Now that the game is out, we’ve decided to focus on the development of the online mode. Our estimations are that this online mode will be available around May.
The update will include other improvements suggested by users:
Remember that when the update is available, the game will NOT update automatically, you’ll have to redownload it (if you purchased the game, you won’t have to pay for it again, don’t worry).
Little Racers review process has finished succesfully and it now it’s available for download at the Marketplace . Feel free to download it to your Xbox and send us your suggestions. We’d love to get feedback from you for future updates and games!.
Although lately i’m finding myself busier than usual, I still try to enjoy as much as I can my free time with videogames.
Here are some games that I’ve been playing these days:
I still have a list of pending games with more than 7 titles on it, I’m starting to get a little stressed about it. It seems I need more spare time to relax a bit :).
During development of an old prototype that never saw the light, I found the need to create some 2D geometry from a set of points that form a line.
After searching for any algorithm that could make what I needed, with no success, I decided to develop my own.
The algorithm is very simple, it just takes a rope and a width and creates a set of vertices tha form a TriangleStrip to be rendered on screen.
[sourcecode language=’csharp’]
///
/// List of points that form the line
/// Desired with of the geometry
/// ///
///
public static List
{
List
Vector2 normal = Vector2.Zero ;
// Generate vertices for each point in the line
for (int i = 0; i < contour.Count; i++)
{
// First and last are special cases, the normal is calculated right away
if (i == contour.Count - 1)
normal = GameMath.Normal(contour[i] - contour[i - 1]);
else if (i == 0)
normal = GameMath.Normal(contour[1] - contour[0]);
else
{
// For the rest of points, determine the normal as the middle angle between the direction of the previous and next segments.
Vector2 delta1 = contour[i] - contour[i - 1];
Vector2 delta2 = contour[i + 1] - contour[i];
if ((delta1.Length()!=0)&&(delta2.Length()!=0))
{
delta1.Normalize();
delta2.Normalize();
normal = GameMath.Normal(delta1 + delta2);
}
}
// Add two vertices to the vertex list
result.Add(contour[i] - normal * width / 2f);
result.Add(contour[i] + normal * width / 2f);
}
return result;
}
///
///
public static Vector2 Normal(Vector2 line)
{
float x = line.X; float y = line.Y;
Vector2 normal = new Vector2();
if (x != 0)
{
normal.X = -y / x;
normal.Y = 1 / (float)Math.Sqrt(normal.X * normal.X + 1);
normal.Normalize();
}
else if (y != 0)
{
normal.Y = 0;
normal.X = (line.Y<0) ? 1 : -1;
}
else
{
normal.X = 1;
normal.Y = 0;
}
if (x < 0)
{
normal *= -1;
}
return normal;
}
[/sourcecode]
That code is well enough to generate a credible line in almost all situations. As for UVs, what I did was assign the even vertices the value (X,0) and odd vertices (X,1), where X is the distance elapsed since the line start.
We’ve uploaded the trailer for Little Racers on Youtube. You can see it right here.
Since our first project (Little Racers) has been completed, we’ve begun development of our next one.
Although some details are still vague, we can assure the game mechanics are a fresh approach to a popular genre, that will enhance cooperation and teamplay.
It’s still a little early to disclose the game name or details, please stay tuned for updates on the project status.
During the last review process, an issue was found that although it could’ve passed the review, we decided to fix it and resubmit again, following our policy of quality. The game won’t be able to begin the review process until next Sunday due to the new policy of the Community Games review process.
We’ve used this time to add some extra features, such as the Attract mode (typical of Arcade games, a non-interactive race starts when some time passes on the main menu), and car horns, that although they don’t do anything special, we’ve found testers to use it extensively to annoy other players :).