By: KJ Tags: Design, Planets, XNA

This is just a small sample of the planet design. The land is simple, 96×96 pixel wide image split in to 9 32×32 tiles. Each planet, depending on its size, is split in to a certain amount of tiles. The player will pick “land” tile and place it on the planet (within a certain amount of blocks away from the edge). The tiles will automatically adjust the edges based on where the tile is in relation to other tiles.

Drawing the land each time is resource intensive, so the way I decided to tackle that idea is to generate a unique planet texture everytime a piece of land is added to the planet. So long as the land on the planet isn’t modified it will use the same texture for for rendering each time. The buildings will be done in the same way to a certain extent so long as the building isn’t animated. Now to actually do it.

By: KJ Tags: Design, Website

For those one or two people that visit this site, this is just a small update to clean up the layout and simplify things some. Here’s a list of the changes:

• Removed Sidebar on all pages
• Stretched all content out to maximize the space
• Resolved a few issues with the pages related to styling and spacing
• Cleaned up some code and reduced code where possible to reduce load time
• Added Google Analytics to help me track the one person that checks the site

There are still a few things that need to be done. The main page needs to be redone as far as blogs and categorizations are concerned and I need to add next & previous blog post links on to each of the blogs, but that should be it.

By: KJ Tags: Design, grid, Spacol, XNA

So my next step in this project is to start cutting things up and that means, grids! I put a lot of thought in to this, since a good grid system could make my life a lot easier down the line. It needed to be able to split up any space, provide the cell(s) that an object is present in, track the type of object that is in a cell and allow updating the grid for a change in the position of an object.

The last part of this was the trickiest. I added a property to my Sprite object called “Type”. It’s a byte that can be used to track the type an object is. For example, different kinds of land can be represented by different bytes (water = 0, land = 1, pavement = 2), where different buildings can be represented by ranges in the same byte set, or can be set to similiar bytes in a seperate grid. For my plans I figured that, for a planet, I could overlay two different grid systems. One grid would manage land while the other would manage buildings.

In the solar system perspective (will be explained later), planets can be represented by the byte range 0-10, while different objects can be anything else. Having a system like this should make it easy to implement the A* pathfinding algorithm quickly, but have it be flexible for different scenarios.

Now that I have the grids, it is time to start building a planet!

By: KJ Tags: Design, Planets, Spacol, XNA

So, my first post related to the new game. I’ll keep this simple. The game is a space-based colonization game. The objective is exploration, mining, and establishing your presense throughout the galaxy. At this point in development my focus is on getting an idea of the scale and size of what I’m trying to do. Here’s a sample of the scale of the game:

These aren’t to actual size. The full size of the largest sphere is 640×640. I believe that should be sufficient for most viewing displays. The user will have the ability to zoom in and out slightly (and defaults for specific screen resolutions will be put in to place), but the planets will be the same size no matter what resolution the game is played in. The player, as they would appear in game, will likely be the size of the moon.

By: KJ Tags: Website, XNA

Welcome to No Sunlight For Us games… again. If there was a single person that had been to the site before, welcome back. If you’re new – you have not missed much. Who am I? KJ. Lead game developer, lead website developer, lead everything. See, this place is my and Nick’s attempt to better our skills. While I focus on game development, he works on bettering his skills as an artist.

History lesson: This is the third time that NSFU has been attempted. See, it isn’t like the first two times were bad… just not great. I would attempt to update the website once every two weeks or so with new content, but I did not really have new content to update with. I was developing an engine (still viewable under the projects section) and wouldn’t detail anything. This time around I have a game idea I’m pursuing and you, my audience, will get to laugh at me as I do so.

So feel free to register, engage each other and have a good time. We’ll see how long this lasts…