Beta/Demo release next week and hopefully around September you’ll see it on Xbox Live Indie Games.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3TH-qYb8Bo

For those who don’t know about the project. Vorpal is a Single Player 2D shooter/Bullet Hell where player-characters try to destroy their opponent’s ship by firing bullets and depleting the ship’s various shields while dodging bullets and while using various powerups to increase the player’s bullet quantity, lives and score. Opponents try to hinder the player’s progress by firing a lot of bullets in artistic patterns.

The following video is just a test of some of the enemy bullet patterns. Sorry about the frameskip, I have yet to find good screen capture software.

this.IsMouseVisible = true;

Then of course, where’s the fun in that, right? Real cursor functionality consists on you adding your own 2D Texture to represent your mouse, this is actually pretty easy to do, first of all, you will need the texture, typically, a cursor texture has its hotspot (The tip of the arrow from where you click) on the upper-left corner of the image. Your cursor could be any size, try not to make it too big or too small.

Here’s an example:

Let’s add a few global variables:

Texture2D cursorTexture;
Vector2 cursorPosition;

Now load the texture in your LoadContent() method:

cursorTexture = Content.Load("cursor"); //Use your asset name.

On our Update() method, we’ll pass over the mouse’s position to our cursorPosition variable:

cursorPosition.X = Mouse.GetState().X;
cursorPosition.Y = Mouse.GetState().Y;

Lastly, we need to draw our cursorTexture with the continuously changing cursorPosition, we do this of course in our Draw() method:

spriteBatch.Begin();
spriteBatch.Draw(cursorTexture, cursorPosition, Color.White);
spriteBatch.End();

Simple as that, try it out!
Happy coding!

OK, seriously, WTF!? Why!? A-anyways, I guess this need some explaining, this “game” was developed using the XNA Framework and you can download it to your 360 via Community Games for a measly 200 Microsoft Points…use your imagination.

At least it’s more useful than this.

I wrote this neat little article for n00bs that would like to create games for Windows and the Xbox 360 using the XNA Framework, it’s actually aimed at those who have very little programming experience. Since Object-Oriented Programming has become pretty much a standard for real software developers and engineers, game development is no exception. However, most beginners tend to get scared and/or confused with this simple paradigm that’s actually designed to make your coding EASIER.

So go ahead! Download it! This tutorial will guide you step by step through the basic principles of the XNA Framework while learning OOP, by the end of it, you’ll create a simple shooter game engine. This article was also featured in ziggyware.com.

[Download Article (PDF)]
[Download the Sample]

If you don’t know what the hell I’m talking about, let me refer to an older post, XNA is a collection of tools developed by Microsoft for developing games for the Xbox 360 and Windows, all you need is either Visual C# Express 2008, which is free, or Visual Studio 2008, which is expensive, and of course, XNA Game Studio Express 3.0, which is also free. Have fun!

YES! XNA Game Studio 3.0!

Now, this is why I like Microsoft, they are just doing so many good things lately (Let us ignore Vista for now) XNA Game Studio 3.0 expands on all the offerings of earlier iterations to include additional functionality to appeal to game developers of every level and enable them to create games to distribute through Xbox LIVE Community Games on the Xbox 360 as part of the New Xbox Experience.

But that’s not all! Besides developing games for the Xbox 360 and Windows PC you can now deploy to Zune! Which of course means, I must get one! The iPod SDK is just too damn expensive!

What are you waiting for? Start downloading XNA Game Studio 3.0 now!