IronReaverGames

Welcome to "IronReaverGames" we are a small indie team trying to develop fun games, we are currently developing for the XBox XNA platform. Please fell free to post comments or send us an email directly.
Please use the links above to read about each project.

Thanks

IronReaverGames

Game jam Manchester - 29/8/2013

For the last couple of months I have been attending a gathering of young people who are interested in all things tech and mentoring anyone who was interested in game dev as its usually a good way to get young people interested in computing. This gathering is called "@CoderDojo" and is held in the Northern Quarter in Manchester at @MadLabu18 which is only 20 mins from where I live and there are many more @CoderDojo 's being held all over the world.

It was through @MadLabu18 where I heard about about the @McrGameJam which was held @MadLabu18 on 28/9/2013.

As I have never been or done anything like this, I decided why not and purchased a ticket for myself and good friend Mark @maycontaingeeks who was also interested in the game dev process (he mainly wanted to know why it took me so long to develop Spectrangle360 :) ).

So on the Saturday morning I set off there with just my laptop and VS2010 installed, I had already decided that what ever I would be developing I would be using C# and the #XNA framework. Before the event we had already been given 5 themes to the game jam and the themes they had chosen where "Climbing, Inversion, Robots, Stealing and Hats" with the challenge of creating a game which would include as many of these themes as possible.

When I arrived, there where a few people already waiting outside for the place to open and after a few introductions I got talking to a guy called Phil who told me he was an illustrator and was hoping to group up with a developer, this worked out great as I really cant draw for toffee. Soon after my friend mark arrived where he had already been thinking about a game design which would include some of the themes.

From this Mark explained that the game would consist of a single platforming screen, where some hats would drop down from a tube. It would be your job as a relentless robot to collect these hats and throw them in the correct delivery shoot. Throwing the hats in the matching shoot would gain more points, the game would have a time limit where the final score would be displayed for each robot, oh yes Mark wanted it too be multi player too :S

So after a pretty full on day and some excellent image delivery from Phil and some great jokes and cajoling from Mark we manage to get some form of a game working. We didnt manage to get half of the game mechanics in we wanted eg multiplayer, matching hat tube scoring etc.. but we did have a pretty complete game with a proper beginning and end and a goal to collect 3 hats, not bad to say I had never attempted a platform game in #XNA with proper collision.

At the end of the day we didnt win the game jam but we definitely had fun doing it and I think hats all that mattered :), I would definitely attend one again in the future. Hats off  :) to the organisers and everyone else who went. 

Anyway here is a link to the code, again please excuse the dodgy coding and such, when your in a rush you definietly have to cut corners in terms of nicely tested code etc.. However if you do use any of it in some way I would hope that you email me at jaywroe (at) gmail.com and just throw me an email with what you thought of the code and how you will use it.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/13974044/GameJam_9_2013/MillineryRobots.zip

Post tinkering

After spending another 1:30 hours I managed to improve the performance of the game when it initializes and when the robot is moving around in terms of collisions with the hats. If I ever get bored or have some spare time I might add the other features we wanted to add and see where it goes...who knows I may recycle some in another game jam.

How Friend Invites work in Spectrangle360

A few #XBLIG #XNA devs have gotten in touch with me over twitter about how I managed to do the "Invite Friend" functionality in Spectrangle360. Although there is an MSDN article on the subject and the XNA gamestatemanagement example shows how this is done I still think a real world example might come in useful for some people.



So I have decided I would explain how I managed to get it to work in Spectrangle360.

Current Structure

Before I dive into the actual code I want to explain a bit about the structure of Spectrangle360 so that the code actually makes sense. Spectrangle360 was developed with the FSM (finite state machine) pattern as a basis, this meant that each of the areas/classes of the game could be split up to handle their own state.



        public interface IState
    {
        void Enter( IStateContext context);
        void Update( IStateContext context, GameTime time);
        void Draw( IStateContext context, SpriteBatch spriteBatch);
        void Exit( IStateContext context);
    }





         public interface IStateContext
    {
        IState State { get; }

        void Update(GameTime time);

        void Draw( SpriteBatch spriteBatch);

        void ChangeState(IState state);
    }



So when Spectrangle360 first starts up the game enters into a "GameS

creenManager" state which inherits from "IState", this "GameScreenManager" state is the main state of the game which is always running unless the game throws any exceptions. From this state other states are entered eg when the Demo is playing, the game is playing or the game is being played via Xbox live and this state "TwoPlayerLobby" is the class that handles all the work when a players is in the lobby trying to create or join a two player game.

The Code

The first piece of code is the code which I used to basically set up some variables and to hook the "InviteAccepted" event :-



    public void Hook(SpectrangleManager manager, GameScreenManager gm, bool hook)
        {
            _mgr = null;

            _mgr = manager;

            _gsm = null;
            _gsm = gm;

            _context = gm;

            if (!hook)
            {
                NetworkSession.InviteAccepted += NetworkSession_InviteAccepted;
            }
        }



This hook code is called from the "MainScreen" state via its enter method like this, "_TPL" is an instance of the "TwoPlayerLobby" class :-



    public void Enter(IStateContext context)
        {
            ...
                ((GameScreenManager)context)._TPL.Hook(((GameScreenManager)context).Manager, (GameScreenManager)context, ((GameScreenManager)context).AcceptHook);

            ...
        }



Having an instance of the "TwoPlayerLobby" class means that the game is always ready to accept invites when the player is in the "TwoPlayerLobby" state.



The code used once a game invite has been accepted is this :-



    public void NetworkSession_InviteAccepted(object sender, InviteAcceptedEventArgs e)
        {

            Game1.HSC.SearchNetworkOff = true;
            Game1.HSC.Enabled = false;

            _gsm.GameSearch.Disable = true;

            {

                // stops a different gamer controller joining a game in progress
                if (e.Gamer.PlayerIndex != Game1.Global.Controller())
                {
                    _gsm.ChangeState(new NetworkErrorMessage("You cannot join game in progress with a different gamer. Please return to the title screen if you wish to swap profiles."));
                    return;
                }


                // Quit the current session
                if (_mgr.Session != null)
                {
                    try
                    {
                        _mgr.Session.Dispose();
                        _mgr.Session = null;
                    }
                    catch
                    {
                        return;
                    }
                }



                // We can now create a new instance of the SpectrangleManager game and then create the player instances to be used later.




                _gsm.Manager = new SpectrangleManager( Game1.Global.Content, (GameScreenManager)_gsm);

                _mgr = _gsm.Manager;

                _mgr.Players[0] = new Player(_mgr, PlayerIndex.One, "1", PlayerSide.WHITE, false);
                _mgr.Players[1] = new Player(_mgr, PlayerIndex.Two, "2", PlayerSide.BLACK, false);

                try
                {
                    // Join the new session
                    _mgr.Session = NetworkSession.JoinInvited(1);
                }
                catch
                {
                    _gsm.ChangeState(new NetworkErrorMessage("Unable to join game in progress."));
                    return;
                }







                // hook the normal network session events
                HookSessionEvents();


                // We can change the state to wait for the host to start as we have now accepted the friend invite
                _gsm.ChangeState(new WaitForHostToStart(2, false, _mgr,_mgr.Session));
            }
           
        }





And there you have it, this code allows friend invites to be accepted and once the invite is accepted the "GameScreenManager" main state is changed to "WaitForHostToStart" state. Yes I know this could have been done much cleaner but I just wanted to get this to work the easiest way I could at the time. If I ever develop another multiplayer game with Xbox Live friend invites I would probably look at this whole code again to see if I could improve it.



Anyway hope it helps some one.



Jase

Using SpriteVortex to create animations

The other day whilst experimenting with some projects I started looking round the web to see if there was a tool I could use to extract a Spritesheet I could use in XNA from an image which had number of different animation frames.

Well I couldnt find anything that exactly did what I wanted but I did find a little app called SpriteVortex. 

http://spritevortex.codeplex.com/documentation

This app seems to be able to scan an image and pick out the frames of your image using a colour key and construct a list of sprites. The app then lets you construct a list of animation sets which you can add each sprite too and it even has a little animation preview window where you can offset each frame to get them to animate correctly and set the animation time for each frame.

When you have done with your animation you can then export the whole thing to an XML file.

This all sounded good however I couldnt seem to find a way use this XML to generate animation in my own XNA project. So I got to thinking how I would do it. Well as the XML is simply XML I thought I might be able to write my own XML deserializer to read in the XML and construct the sprite and animation objects from the data.

After doing a bit of reading round on serializing and deserializing I came up with this cs file :-

namespace SpriteVortexDeserialize
{
 
    [XmlRoot("Sprite")]
    public class Sprite
    {
        [XmlAttribute("Name")]
        public string Name;
 
        [XmlAttribute("Id")]
        public int Id;
 
        [XmlElement("Coordinates")]
        public Coordinates Coordinates;
    }
 
    [XmlRoot("Coordinates")]
    public class Coordinates
    {
        [XmlElement("X")]
        public int X;
        [XmlElement("Y")]
        public int Y;
        [XmlElement("Width")]
        public int Width;
        [XmlElement("Height")]
        public int Height;
    }
 
    [XmlRoot("Animation")]
    public class Animation
    {
        [XmlAttribute("Name")]
        public string Name;
 
        [XmlAttribute("FrameRate")]
        public int FrameRate;
 
        [XmlAttribute("Loop")]
        public string Loop;
 
        [XmlAttribute("PingPong")]
        public string PingPong;
 
        [XmlArray("Frames")]
        [XmlArrayItem("Frame", typeof(Frame))]
        public List<Frame> _frames;
    }
 
    [XmlRoot("Frame")]
    public class Frame
    {
        [XmlAttribute("SpriteId")]
        public int SpriteId;
        [XmlAttribute("OriginX")]
        public float OriginX;
        [XmlAttribute("OriginY")]
        public float OriginY;
        [XmlAttribute("OffSetX")]
        public int OffSetX;
        [XmlAttribute("OffSetY")]
        public int OffSetY;
        [XmlAttribute("Duration")]
        public float Duration;
    }
 
    [XmlRoot("Texture")]
    public class Texture
    {
        [XmlAttribute("Path")]
        public string Path;
        [XmlAttribute("Name")]
        public string Name;
    }
 
    [XmlRoot("SpriteMapping")]
    public class SpriteMapping
    {
        [XmlElement("Texture")]
        public Texture texture;
 
        [XmlArray("Sprites")]
        [XmlArrayItem("Sprite", typeof(Sprite))]
        public List<Sprite> _sprites;
 
        [XmlArray("Animations")]
        [XmlArrayItem("Animation", typeof(Animation))]
        public List<Animation> _animations;
    }
} 

Once you have this class you can then deserialize the XML into this object structure using this code :-

SpriteMapping spriteMapping = new SpriteMapping();

XmlSerializer serializer = new XmlSerializer(spriteMapping.GetType());
TextReader textReader = new StreamReader("./Content/testknight.xml");
spriteMapping = (SpriteMapping)serializer.Deserialize(textReader);
textReader.Close();

As usual you would have to put your image assets and your XML into the Content project however you have to set the XML file to ContextProcessor = "No Processing Required" and Copy to Output Directory = "Always Copy".

Hope this helps somebody out who wants to use this little app without writing your own sprite manager functionality, also if I get some feedback on this post I might also upload a sample project but havent decided that yet.
Jase

More reviews

More reviews,

We got another review from @IndieGamerChick, to be honest we were quite worried about the review as in the past IndieGamerChick had found the issues relating to the multi player part of the game and she is also known for her very ... how can I say cutting remakes.

To be fair I am actually quite happy with the review, she tells it how it is, which I can safely say is better then some of the reviews I got which just moaned about the music... She also actually ranked us 83rd on here 100 leader board. Anyway here is the link.

Indie Gamer Chick reviews Spectrangle360 http://indiegamerchick.com/2012/07/17/spectrangle360/

Jase

First update

Spectrangle360 - Update 1

So it’s almost been 4 months since Spectrangle360 went on to the Xbox Live indie marketplace and the first update for Spectrangle360 has finally passed the review process.

Why do an update?

I have asked this question to myself several times and haven’t come up with a good answer, the best answer I have is that personal pride made me do it. If I was doing this for the money I would certainly not sell enough versions of Spectrangle360 to make up for the number of hours I have ploughed into this game.  

The problem

Basically Spectrangle360 worked, it worked very well if I do say so myself having been the first indie game I have ever released. But there was some very annoying issues being seen when playing Spectrangle360 over Xbox Live in the wild. Now most indie games don’t include multiplayer over Xbox Live and they don’t include it for 1 reason... complexity. Now I am not using this as an excuse, developing an Xbox Live game on your own and being able to test all online scenarios is almost an impossible task. This meant on the release of Spectrangle360 people had synchronization problems and disconnection problems which meant playing online was basically pointless.  

Update Fixes

My first mission was to remove these synchronization issues from the game and to also fix some other small problems on the way if given time. Well after 4 months I think I have achieved this goal. Here is a list if the issues the update hopes to fix.

• Multiplayer synchronization issues when playing and rotating pieces. 
• Adding a new score board to record and display online games vs humans. 
• Added "Invites" to allow people to invite their friends and join peoples lobbies. 
• Pausing whilst playing online. 
• Improving the score screen to allow players to compare stats against cpu and humans. 
• Being able to change the music straight away. (Still need to get more tracks) 
• Improving the credits screen "QR-code" to allow people to navigate to our website easier (hoping for some more player feedback).  

Future

I am hoping these changes both restore my reputation on the indie scene plus I am hoping a lot more people play the game online now. Most of all I can rest happy knowing these I managed to fix these issues all the while dealing with everyday life (maybe more on this some time). I am also thinking about setting up some sort of league to play online but I guess I would only do this if I know people read this blog and participated, it would be good to play some the 200+ people that have purchased the game.

I guess we will see what happens...

Jase

1 Week on #XBLIG ....WOW

So,

Its been over a week of being on Xbox360's indie Xbox Live channel and man its been busy. Busy? what do you mean busy? I hear you say, well if you want to get some decent sales on Xbox Live the first few weeks are the most important I feel. You really have to try hard to get your game known as much as possible before the game slips down into the recent published list. So to get my name and Spectrangle360 out there I have been emailing and tweeting/retweeting as much as possible, below is a list of hopefully all the reviews I have managed to get so far. Most of the them think that Spectrangle360 is a good game but limited to the board game enthusiast, which to be honest I was expecting any way here's the list. Hope I didn't miss any and if I did...sorry:-

http://juliasherred.com/2012/03/spectrangle360-review/

http://theindiemine.com/spectrangle360-released-xbox/

http://otakudgamereviews.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/spectrangle360-xblig-classic-board-game.html

http://www.thegamejar.com/2012/03/theindiejar-spectrangle-screenshots/

http://indietheory.com/review/9-xblig/68-review-akane-the-kunoichi

To those that helped me with these reviews I want to say thanks, I specially want to thank @DaddyPigGames and @MayContainGeeks you should look these guys up on twitter there great :).

So whats next, well I plan to do an update to Spectrangle360 from the things I am not happy with myself and a few issues but more on that in another post. I hope to keep Spectrangle360 in the lime light as it where for as long as possible and just build on what I have already done so far.

And if you have bought Spectrangle360 I just want to say a BIG THANKS.

Your awesome, also let me know what you think of the game and what you would like improving.

Jase

Spectrangle360 now on the marketplace

Hi, Well for once MS have been quite responsive. When I pushed the "Publish Now" there is a warning saying it could take upto 24 hours. So I thought that if worst came to the worst I should press the button today at around 12pm in hopes that the game will be available Friday (23/3/12). Well the game actually published in 2 hours...this was the fastest part of the process, anyway here it is.

Click to download from the Xbox live

Offically an Xbox360 indie developer

Finally.....FINALLY I managed to get Spectrangle360 past peer review and I am now able to publish it to the Xbox indie market place.

It wasnt an easy ride by any stretch of the imagination, after entering playtest on 9/11/2011 and submitting the game 17 times and then starting the review process on 1/12/2011 and submitting 8 times I finally got the 8 passes I needed.

So whats next, well the next step is to finally press that "Publish Now" button, my initial plan is to do this on the 23/3/2012 so that the game will be available the next day (Friday) hopefully. Mean while I plan to use all the contacts that I have made over the months to get the word out about Spectrangle360 and hopefully build a little interest before the game is available.

Theres plenty of things to do, wish me luck.....

Highscores Component XNA v4.0

Highscores Component XNA v4.0

A while ago I downloaded Jon Watte's Highscore Component. However after using it for quite some time it became apparent that I had to convert this to work in the new XNA v4.0.

So I did this work, I cant say how well I converted it but it seems to work for me. If you would find this useful heres a link to the CS file. You will have to pull this CS file into your project and change the namespace to match the name of your games namespace. Hope it helps someone in some way.

highscorescomponent.cs

Jase

More review\playtests, new contacts & paying it forward

Well after pulling Spectrangle360 from playtest then putting it into review then pulling the game and putting it back to playtest rince and repeat at least 2 more times I now have more of a feeling how the XBLIG review\playtest process works.

The most difficult aspect of it all is to get enough people interested in your game that people will use their own time to download your game, playtest it and post comments on the thread with any issues they find. Even harder is once you think you have fixed all the issues you then have to get enough passes in order that your game passes review and then gets published to Xbox Live.

So where am I up to so far? Well after finding some more contacts and paying it forward (in other words trying to do as many playtest\reviews as possible in hopes that some people will feel obliged to return the favour). I got some quite good feedback, the main feedback was to remove the high score sharing code as this at the moment is very problematic and would take to long to fix for the first version. I have also replaced the high score sharing with an online game notification system.

So when some one starts playing Spectrangle360 online anyone else playing the game at the same time will get notified and then have the option to join the game. I will test these features as much as possible and put the game into playtest again for a week and then try and drum up some playtests.

Jase

Back to Playtest again

Well we managed to get a review of our game Spectrangle360 but the first review we got was a code 4 which means a complete fail. so after talking with some of the XNA community members @KrisWD40 and @MachXGames we decided to pull our game and put it back into playtest. Hopefully we can get some more feedback and review might be alot more smoother in a week or so.

Anyway here are some screen shots of the game to hopefully peek your interest.





Jase

Playtest results

So,

After 2 weeks of play test I managed to get some positive feedback about the game. Mostly every one seemed to think the game was interesting and fun to play. The only other miner issues that people found where:-

The piece didn't swap sides depending on what side was playing.

The ai sometimes took too long on very hard level to play its move.

And I also got reports that the numbers where too small to read.

So after 2 weeks I was hoping to get more response but for some reason (hopefully not the game) that is all I got. So what is the next step? Well I am not going to let my lack of feedback set me back. I am going to spend some time finishing the other bits of the game and then put the game into review and hopefully get some feedback this way other wise my game will be finally published.

Jase

Playtest

Well after months and months and months of chipping away at this game + doing a triatholon and going on various holidays I have finally got the game in a state where most of the functionality can be playtested.

I still have a few things to finish off but at this point its good to get some feedback about the current game and hopefully if I can get some good feedback I can implement this into the final game too.

So I hope to post again soonish with the feedback I recieve and hopefully get the game in to the next stage which is review time.

Jase

Progress....

Well its been a while since I updated this but I have finally been making progress on Spectrangle. As you can see its taken me longer then I anticipated, the reason for this is well general life things as usual finding the time to keep chipping away at Spectrangle is hard at best. With me doing my first Sprint triathlon and going away on the odd short holiday just eats up your time.
One major stumbling block was the networking, although I had pretty much figured out the API I was having difficulty with the connection just dropping for no good reason. So my first task was to refactor all the code to work the same as all the supplied Microsofts samples...thus to no avail. I then tried to analyse the data sent from the samples and after a while these showed the dropping out issue.
I finally tracked the problem down to being wireless....??? what, yes thats right my Xbox Slim is wireless and my laptop is wireless. Hard wiring these into my BT home hub instantly fixed the problem. This discovery really helped and let me get on with finishing of the network code, to a state now where you can play a full game on Xbox live...go me.
My next tasks where to re implement the AI, this wasnt much of an issue as I had already figured out the algorithms on the Silverlight version.
My task now are to finish of the AI player configuration and get all the surrounding functionality working, I dont want to put a date on it but August to September I hope to have the game play testable.

Stay tuned.

Jase

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.

KOTH in playtest

Well we decided to bite the bullet and finally get our first XNA game (KingOfTheHill) into playtest so hopefully we can receive some constructive criticism about the game and make any improvements that will hopefully make the game a lot more playable.

As far as we know the only thing we hadnt finished for playtest was the tutorial segment of the game, there is enough to get a general feel for it but we hope to add more to it as the playtest progresses.

Check back here as we will be detailing what was found in our first XNA game in playtest.

Jase

Playtest forum link: http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/t/65452.aspx