Building XNA Games- P3: I would like to acknowledge John Sedlak, who saved this book from certain doom, as well as all of the great guys in the XNA community and Microsoft XNA team, who helped me with all of my stupid programming questions. (That is actually the term used—“stupid programming question”—and it is a question that one should not have to ask if one has been approached to write a book about the subject.) | CHAPTER 3 PLANNING YOUR GAME 47 We have some very rough mockups of a hero and some combat. Let s round this out with a level mockup. We inadvertently created a protagonist who looks just made for a zombie-smashing epic. This means that zombies are bound to be the antagonists and high-octane wrench-and-revolver smashing will become the game play. The setting keeping in line with a game that is just making itself at this point will have to be a cemetery as shown in Figure 3-6. Figure 3-6. Concept art maps There we have it We think we ve pretty much nailed the look and feel of this game with minimal effort. We haven t gotten into power-ups enemy design specific maps health death and dying or any of that fun stuff but we ve made tremendous headway. The details will fall into place eventually. Tool Planning So far we ve made some basic decisions about how the game will look and feel but in order to get one step closer to actually building the game we need to broach the concept of tools. Tools will help us be more efficient at developing new level and character designs and implanting them into the game without the need to change source code. Creating tools can be essential in the later stages of a game s development cycle since they allow you to focus on what really matters the drooling brain-eating out-to-get-you zombies The next couple of chapters will be specifically on creating the tools we ll be using and even beyond that we ll be tweaking them as new needs arise. In the meantime we ll need to be pretty clear on the data formats for the two areas where we ll be creating all of the content characters and maps. 48 CHAPTER 3 PLANNING YOUR GAME Map Editor Because we are building a tool we can go back to a more event-based model where the application waits for the user to do something before proceeding. Since we are designing a tool that can handle the generation of maps it makes sense to model it after a jigsaw puzzle. Much like with a jigsaw puzzle we ll drag pieces .
