Well, it's been an exciting week for MiroTale! I'm still a bit overwhelmed by everything that goes into making a game like this, especially some of the PR work. That said, I'm learning a lot and hope I can share it with other indie developers out there when my "quest" with MicroTale has come to an end!
New Features in Beta 2.0:
- Single-player quest and storyline!
- Unique quest objectives like building a certain number of airships or defeating an area boss
- Night and day cycles
- Dynamic lighting
- New tiles such as drills, which make landscaping incredibly easy and terrificly fun
- Improved game mechanics and several bug fixes
Working on improving the game has been a serious exercise in learning the inner workings of XNA Game Studio and C#. Perhaps most notably I found out about the Color.Lerp command (which is the single most useful thing ever when you're writing your own lighting code) and the power of using
BlendState.Additive to make some interesting lighting effects. If you use XNA and are interested in any of that technical junk, feel free to contact me at the game website, www.jenito.com..
Lights like these aren't difficult using XNA's BlendState properties and a little creativity
Personally I feel that the airships are perhaps one of the coolest features in MicroTale. The new trailer focuses primarily on showing off the new drills, but my plan is to add several more new tiles to give the airships even more pazazz! They're working in a very stable way right now, which really pleases me as a developer. When I look back at some of the code I wrote to actually make the things work it seems a bit unrealisitc, like, did I really do all that? But good base code results in being able to add lots of features on top without worrying about the foundation blasting into a million pieces. That's been comforting.
An airship with drills is a beautiful, beautiful thing. . .
Anyway, that about sums up the most recent developments. Again, if you have questions about how anything has been done or feedback on the game itself don't hesitate to contact me here or over at my website, www.jenito.com. Also, don't forget to download the free beta at the website as well. Hope everyone can enjoy the game!
