A simple 3D Tank Game

So to get the ball rolling on this whole XNA game blog thingy, I shall stick a link here to a video which pretty much shows the state of the game as it currently stands.

My intention is to retrospectively blog about a lot of the process of getting to this stage, then carry on blogging as I extend the game further.

The game is loosely based on the old Stellar 7 game idea of tank battles in a simple space setting. I was inspired by a conversation I had about sitting in front of the old Apple ][ playing hours of Stellar 7, and listening to lots of Jean Michel Jarre's Oxygene album. I thought it would be a nice little project to get back into some game programing, and try out some simple AI ideas.

Anyway, here's a video showing the current state of the game:

Time to try again

OK, so I thought I would try this whole blogging thing again and see how it goes. My current intention (following a suggestion by David Taylor) is to try to blog about the process of creating a simple 3D game using XNA as middleware for directX development on windows.

Perhaps this will, as previously, be my last post for another couple of years — but hopefully not.

Con Week 1 (removed)

Removed:

Since the blogging about the con course never really took off, mainly because the course was a bit of a disappointment, I have removed this post by way if historical revisionism.

Conservatorium Course

I finally got off my fat arse and signed up for a course at the Sydney Con. I have for some time been thinking about doing some sort of study to do with composition. Something to help motivate and direct me was what I had in mind.

I have decided I will try to blog about the course, including all the pieces of music and musical exercises that I produce. We have already had six of the eight weeks of class, so this will be mostly done as a retrospective.

Audio Testing.

I would like to be able to embed sound files from Soundclick.com directly into this blog. Below I have tried to create a link to one of the tracks I have uploaded to soundclick.com.

A Tune For Mum

I modified the html generated by the soundclick script to remove some of the extra crap around the player. It is much more streamlined and visually appealing now.

Well, I ended up having to modify the page template to widen the main text column. I couldn't work out a way of forcing the soundclick widget to a width other than 470 pixels, which was too wide for the default template. Bit of a shame really, the narrow column for posts did have a certain aesthetic charm.

Video Testing.

Let's see if we can embed a video file here.

This is a little animation study I did from the Disney Snow White movie.

Where to from here

So I figured it was probably about time I posted another entry on this blog. If I am ever going to get into this blogging thing, I obviously have to post entries.

I would like to try using this as a vehicle for recording my experience with the "Music Arranging and Composition" course I am doing at the con.

I wonder if it is possible to have subsections or side threads or something similar.

I guess I will have to learn about embedding media in blog posts if I want to include any of the music exercises.

First I will try linking to a sound file on soundclick.com. This is a little theme I wrote just before starting the con course. It was inspired by something on the website of our instructor Tamara O'Brien.

I wonder if there is some way to include audio media in a more immediate way. Perhaps some bastardisation of the video embedding.