As a personal blog, my posts tend to focus on personal things, hobbies etc…  I could blog a whole lot more, but I do tend to wait till there’s something people might be interested in actually reading! 

Reading this blog, you’d probably think all I do is XNA game development,  occasional tutorials on the subject, and most notably journal my work-in-progress on the “Sharky’s Air Legends” game.

I do in fact have a day job.  Something has to pay the bills after all. And as we all know day jobs tend to take the majority of our precious time.

So breaking with tradition, I’m now going to introduce you to something very VERY cool that I’ve been developing in my day job.

At Intergen, I’m proud to be team-leading the software development of a great new product called “ActionThis“.

It’s is a Web 2.0 application that simplifies working as a team. I’m sure you’re all familiar with this problem: “you go along to meetings, agree a bunch of action items, then nothing gets doneâ€?. We’re going to fix that, and then some more! Where Project Management is all about planing & tracking, we’re adding execution & recovery to the mix.

Exciting times, and we’re going to be launching world-wide later this year.  I’m not allowed to talk much about this right now, but you can signup for the newsletter and get on the beta.

Now I started by saying that said that this isn’t strictly XNA game dev related. But hell, I can’t think of a single reason why this wouldn’t suit teams of indy game developers working on the next great XNA game.

Once again, apologies for the quietness of the blog lately.  Life’s got exponentially busy lately.

While I may not have been blogging about it, I have actually been doing quite a lot to “Air Legends”. 

I still have some polishing and bug fixing to do before I can release, but here’s what I’ve been doing…

• I’ve added a much requested Special Maneuver (aka. evade) feature!  I’m stoked about this.  It really makes the gameplay a lot more dynamic.  Essentially,  using the Special Maneuver button you can trigger the plane to pull the maneuver.  Currently there are two maneuvers.  When climbing the plane will pull back into a verticle loop ending in a dive. When in a dive, the plane will pull up into a climb. So you end up with a 180 degree turn.  The two maneuvers blend into one 360 degree loop if you hold the button down.  Besides the variety this adds to the gameplay, the coolest thing is how the plane flys towards or away from the camera during the maneuver.  Including the bullets comin’ right at ya 3D stylez!  This also makes the maneuver a natural way of evading a collision if you time it right.  I plan to add maneuvers for horizontal flight (left & right).  I’m also planning to add the ability to make any maneuver a fake maneuver, so you can “fake out” your opponent, fool them into following and then counter attack. :p
• I’ve added a geeky console option, to help me diagnose problems, even on release builds. The console is non-interactive at the moment, but overlays the text above the action while you play. It shows the conventional log of game events.  But my favourite feature is the unscrolling display of key game state, such as each plane’s position, rotation etc… I’m grateful for XNA’s new font support.  Pretty easy really.
• I had to tweak some controls a little to make the Special Maneuver feature more accessible.

There’s probably more good stuff that I’ve forgotten.  Anyway,   I’m looking forward to releasing these new features soon.  Just got to fix the bugs I’ve introduced first!