Wednesday, December 7, 2011

Xbox, Siphon Spirit Woes and March to the Moon Sounds

So I got me an XBox360. Figured I'd have to port March to the Moon to it fairly soon and got a good deal on it on Black Friday. I've been playing a lot of indie game demos and have gotten a fairly good idea about what to do for my demo. Nothing. Or when the player goes to quit do a short pitch maybe. See, I kept playing demos that would have a "Purchase Now" option on the main screen and default you to that. So if you weren't paying attention you might buy it by mistake. That's pretty dirty, but the one that takes the cake is Avatar Laser Wars. This demo pissed me off. To start with, the only thing you could do was use practice mode. This involves you walking through empty corridors and shooting the rare targets that pop up. On top of that, you couldn't get any power ups. When you reached one it would show a screen telling you that you had to buy the game to have any fun. Guess what? If your demo is no fun then there is no reason to pay for the full game. And look at the control scheme they have. TWO different buttons commonly used in gameplay for buying the game. And that controller screen wasn't up there very long either. I ended up fumbling along trying to find out what I should do and ended up almost buying the darn thing twice. I hate you, Avatar Laser Wars. I will never give you any money.



Moving on. Siphon Spirit has been giving Peter a little trouble. It's been crashing randomly and loading incorrect levels. But just for him. I can't get it to crash at all and haven't run into any of these issues. This is a problem because I need it to crash for me so I can fix it. I added in a debug log to catch the error, which we had determined was in the map screen draw function, but now all the crashes happen in the score calculation instead. Hopefully we can get this fixed soon! Peter's really making a push on it and hopefully we'll be able to get a new demo out soon. The one that we still have up is incredibly old. I should probably boot it up and check out all the differences.

March to the Moon on the other hand is progressing well. I've been listening to SFXR make random sound effects until I find one I like and save it off to attach to something later. I'm using the random function because I don't really understand sound that well yet. I've been making progress on it and am getting to the point that I need to record some voice work. Wish me luck!

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