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Breeze has now been submitted for peer review and will hopefully be released sometime in the near future. If you've got access to an XNA Creators Club account for the XBox 360, feel free to download it and review it through the usual channels on the Microsoft XNA website.
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I'm pleased to announce that the first Null City game is almost ready!
Introducing Breeze!
Breeze is a single player game written for the XBox and later to be released for the PC. It was written entirely in XNA using the Null City Kitae game engine and features 60 unique levels of flowery twitch action for you to feast upon.
Breeze is light entertainment for persons of any age. Take control of a fan as you strive to gently blow a flower to the goal. Control the flower by proxy across the 60 levels using only the power of wind. Take the flower through all four seasons to reach the goal. Breeze comes with a chilled, lilting soundtrack and an emphasis on the smooth. There's plenty of content to explore with unique and interesting traps and game mechanics.
Teaser Trailer:
Screenshots:
  
  
  
The official address for breeze is http://www.breezegame.com and future information will be posted there.
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I’ve not updated the blog for a while, but it’s not because nothing has been happening - far from it! In fact, Kitae is still being developed full steam, as well along with other projects which I’ll go into in a minute. This new release provided to the testers today contains a bunch of new functionality that I’ve been meaning to add for a while now. You can now toggle visibility of layers on the scene dock, which allows you to build even more complex scenes without having to fight to select the correct actor with the mouse; this can be seen in the shot below.
Kitae now has a simple storage management mechanism, which deals with a large amount of the grunt involved with cross-platform support for storage devices (namely the storage dialog on the 360). Kitae’s main Game class KitaeGame now has a link to a Store object, which allows you to binary serialize simple flat (graph-less) data classes and contains a mini basic value serializer. It will serialize most of the base types (int, float, long, etc) and some of the commonly used types (Rectangle, Vector2, etc) but will not serialize custom data types. This can be used in the following way in Kitae:
Code:
game.Store.SaveFlatObject(myData, “filename.dat”);
game.Store.SaveFlatList<T>(myList, “filename.dat”);
I’m willing to bet, most people can get away with this in their XNA games. Of course, you won’t be serializing complex save state data like this. But for arcade games that basically have option data and maybe some highscores or record times, this is all you will need.
If you do need to serialize more complicated data, you can of course simply use the Xml version of the same function:
Code:
game.Store.SaveXmlObject(myData, “filename.dat”);
Simple? Hopefully this will speed up the time it takes people to implement data storage for their game cross-platform. As well as these features more bugs are getting squashed and some of the long-standing issues are being addressed.
Additionally, there have been a couple of new examples since I last posted on the blog, one which shows you how to use this new storage class and one that creates emitter based animated sprites.
And finally a side note about the other projects I'm working on related to Kitae:
When I originally started work on Kitae about a year ago, the goal was not to write a saleable product. It was always simply to build an engine that I would feel comfortable building games on top of, and to provide integration in such a way that doing so could be achieved as quickly as possible.
Every, maybe, 2 months or so in the development of Kitae I come up with some new crack-pot idea for a game. I now have about 5 games in the pipelines which are all yet to be finished and they are being written in tandem with Kitae. While I don’t like having 5 unfinished games sitting there, I think this has greatly improved the quality of Kitae, mainly because it constantly introduces me to things I’ve not yet thought about or missing functionality/functionality that needs work in the engine. Probably the best side-effect of this is that I’m continuously using the Game Editor during Kitae’s development. While it’s not perfect yet, so much of the functionality in the editor is there because I’ve been annoyed by some quirk or have needed some specific feature. Upshot is that these games are basically driving the development of Kitae, that and the bugs the testers are finding.
One of these games I’ve been developing is now roughly 75% complete and I’m expecting to complete work on it in the next 2 weeks. Once it’s nearly complete there will be more information available here and I’ll be uploading it to Indie games for peer review. This will most likely be the first finished game written with Kitae.
As always, if you still want to be part of the beta test, sign up today, there’s plenty of time to participate.
For more updates, follow NullCity on twitter: http://twitter.com/NullCity.
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Well it's that time!
The very first Kitae Alpha version 0.5 has been released to a select few beta testers. More testers may be added over time, and if you would like to test Kitae and grab yourself a free licence for the final version of the engine, please sign up and fill out the form over at the Members section of the website.
Anyway enough about that, to mark the occasion, here's a nifty particle effect from the latest example:
The one really cool thing about this example, is there was absolutely ZERO user generated code, everything in this example can be produced with the mouse alone through the Game Editor. The example will be bundled with the final version.
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I realise it's been a while since I've posted, I've been very busy with various projects, including Kitae. Fear not, much development time has been sunk into Kitae over the last few months and it appears to be coming together very nicely (barring some nasty PC laptop graphics card issues).
Anyway I wanted to share the latest feature of Kitae: Scene Transitions. Kitae now sports 30 unique transitions out-of-the-box. All ready to use with a few lines of code! Thanks to the great work done on the WPF-FX project, I've managed to convert the transition shader effects to XNA and build them as re-usable content into the engine. We've got swirl effects, circle tranistions, disolves, pixelations, saturations, water effects, blur effects, you name it, it's probably there.
Here's a video of the transition example which I'm planning to release with the engine:
Sorry for the poor framerate on the video, YouTube seems to have made a bit of a mess of it. Fear not, it runs at a nice 60FPS solid @ high resolution.
Thanks to Eifion Bedford for the fantastic photos, his work can be found here.
Additional information on Kitae's transitions feature can be found in the Kitae Transitions section.
Alpha TestingKitae will be entering Alpha Test phase hopefully in the next week. For anyone that is interested in testing, please read the FAQ.
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