Future

Me and Gaz had the opportunity to do a Show n' Tell with the XNA UK User Group alongside Beatnik Games and their project, Plain Sight. It was really great to meet the Beatnik guys, play their project and see a few more peeps play Sumo Squash. I had fun playing Plain Sight, I thought it had some great ideas and shows a lot of promise. Having since seing Plain Sight at the Eurogamer Expo, Alex at Beatnik Games told me that they had be beavering away for the Expo based on some of the feedback they recieved at the Show n' Tell, and I like where its headed!

The Show n' Tell also gave us a chance to get some feedback for our game, as small and simple it is compared to Plain Sight. When we show our game, people always seem to have a good time playing it, and this time it was no exception. After some drinks and chat with the people at the Show n' Tell, we decided that we should spend some time polishing and adding features that we had liked to put in, with the added possibility of submitting it to Community Games in a couple of months.

Whilst doing this, we are also thinking of other game ideas for future projects, using Sumo Squash as a stepping stone to them. For the next projects we plan to start making prototypes/ white box testing for game mechanics, so we know they work before developing a full game, and to refine mechanics that we can draw upon later.

Next up on the grand agenda are plans to improve the tools that we are using at the moment. First off, as mentioned in other posts, the LevelEditor only contains the barebones, I plan to spend some time refactoring and adding features. The idea is to make everyone's life easier and take some of the work from me, as it is all to easy for me to become a bottleneck. -So there plans to create tools, or make the Level editor support the visual creation of animations and menu UI's.