King Of The Hill - KOTH

KOTH was a card game invented by my friend Mark Slattery way back in 1999, whilst talking to mark about developing a simple yet fun game for the Xbox Indie channel we decided it would be cool to implement this card game.

The main reason to do such a simple game was to basically get to grips with the XNA framework as a whole and game development.


Well after many months this game began to actually take shape and be quiet a playable game however it looked pants due to my poor drawing skills as I draw the sprites initially to get the game going.
Here is one of the first screen shots from it:-

I eventually managed to find a great artist who not only was really fast at redoing all the art for KotH he also didnt want much in return, just the experience of doing it. As you can imagine guys like this are hard to find  but I hope we can work together on other titles in the future.

Its quite amazing how cool your game will look once you get a decent artist to do your graphics :)

Where is KotH at now?

Well I still aim to get this onto the Xbox Live indie channel but I hope to try to piggy back onto my other game in development "Spectrangle360" success (hopefully).
I am hoping that once Spectrangle360 is out there people might start to actively look for other games developed by us...well you have to hope dont you :)

Jase

Xbox Live - Multiplayer

So I almost have multiplayer working in Spectrangle, It was nto as hard as I thought it was however I am still a little doubltful that its going to still work once actually playing over the internet.

At the moment I can almost play a full game between my development laptop and my Xbox and its actually quite cool moving and placing trangs on my laptop and having them move on the Xbox.

Once I have this fully working though, I plan to spend a lot more time polishing the game. I guess as its not a very complex game interms of features I really want it to be slick so people that play the trial game might think..wow this really is a slick game of Spectrangle I would buy that for a doller. To help me make it looking good I actually recieved some of the actual box art from the original board game by jumbo so I will definatly hope to use that some where.

Anyway if you have any thoughts on what I can do to add value to the game or any thought in general it would be nice to hear from you.

Jase

Spectrangle

Spectrangle360

Well I actually started this project a while back just to see how hard it would be to develop Spectrangle for the 360 and to my suprise it was actually quite easy, once I managed to get the trangs generated and the coordinate system working which uses the analog stick to move the trangs around the board.

As I mentioned on the main page, after a number of emails between myself and Jumbo and showing them the prototype that I had developed in Silverlight, Jumbo finally agreed to let me use their IP. Currently I have the basics of the game working (Including a basic AI opponent) but here are the features I am hoping to add to the final Spectrangle360.

• 4 player multiplayer on the same Xbox
• 4 player network play
• Global highscores
• Different game types for Spectrangle
• And 4 AI difficulties

So heres what I have managed to create so far :-

As you can see, due to the much better resolutions of the Xbox more detail can be added to make the Trangs look photo realistic instead of using vector images.

Well thats it for now, I have been dying to tell people what I have been up to and now I have the proper permissions I can and I hope to have Spectrangle360 available soon.

Jase

New Project....sort off

Well I have not been able to update KOTH from when I last put it in for play test on the XBLIG last year and the reason why was that I had an idea to start a different project which I already had some experience of creating.

This project was a version of "Spectrangle" published by Jumbo which I developed in Silverlight, here is a link to that game which I completed a while back.

http://www.game-of-the-gods.com/sandbox/spacerocks/clientbin/spectrangle.html
(You while need Silverlight to run this)

Anyway I got to thinking that why dont I ask the games owner Jumbo to allow me to create a version for the Xbox and maybe other platforms.

Read more on the "Spectrangle360" tab where I plan to update the page with the latest developments.