A Game releases, and I jabber about random things!

Man its been a while, I have been in a long long development cycle and getting my XNA skills up while working on Endless Princess.  But what matters now is that it is out!

You can now buy Endless Princess on Xbox Live Indie Games, or from the xbox.com website: click here
EP was in development for far to long, but in the end it was absolutely worth it.  Algitt Studios first commercial game is now out in the world, and we have two titles under our belts.

Let me roll through a little bit of the game plan.  The plan was to go through these stages, release a 2d game (1. Get through the production cycle of a full game, start to finish), release another 2d game (2. Get through the production cycle of a commercial game, and work with a more standard programming language (in this case C# and XNA).  We are now at stage 3, which is do a 3D Game.  That was always the goal, to get up to doing a 3D game, because thats where Algitt can reach its broadest market.

Frankly, I know this might sound crazy to some devs out there, but a 3D game is far easier than a 2D game for a one man studio.  Now of course this is relative, if my previous 2D games had art that was 8 bit retro style, it might have been faster to do a 2D game.  But trying to do flash based animation vs. 3D animation, the 3D is faster.  You can reuse everything if you design for it the right way, and that,s the plan for this next game.  All the characters will utilize the same rig, so their animation can be shared across.  This makes prototypes substantially faster, when in the early stages I can share, run, death, celebrate, idle, etc. animations with multiple characters.  Now that being said, as you can tell from Algitt's previous 2D games, I like to think inside the box, because I know I am not an environment guy, so if I can frame the gameworld inside a small area, I can usually pump a little more quality into it, than I would if the game was bigger and required a level of design that escapes me for architecture.  That being said, the next Algitt game will randomly generate alot of the level, giving it more variety than any game that we've released so far.

I've rambled on enough, more to come on the next game in its own post.  My lunch is over, time to get back to art-ing and networking!