I figured this would happen, but not this soon. I have a huge following from Genryu’s Blade and fans of my art/animation from the ShockAnime Days - (many of which have contacted me through YouTube or email). It's seems 90% of my followers and fans are requesting that I create a 2D sprite game instead of 3D. I admit, at first I said, "No, I want to make 3D games", then many of you made very valid points on why I should make a 2D game instead.

Genryu's Blade Originally created in 2000

Here are a few points mentioned:

• You have a huge fan following (since 1998) of your 2D work not 3D.
  
  
• Games like Shank, Scott Pilgrim, SkullGirls, Limbo, Dishwasher and Bloodrayne Betrayal have given gamers a taste of the next generation of 2D games - and they want more.
  
  
• Castle Crashers have been one the top sellers on Xbox live Arcade since its release.
  
  
• 2D Games can be created by one person (google Dean Dodrill or James Silva) and still look and feel professional, as opposed to 3D games (which normally needs a team to make good games)
  
  
• You animated Genryu's Blade with just your mouse and keyboard almost 12 years ago, imagine what you can do now with your wacom tablet and other tools.
  
  
• If you make a 3D game (gamers don't care if you're Indie), many gamers will automatically compare it to games like Uncharted, Call of Duty, Battlefield, God of War, etc., and if it doesn't look better or close to that quality, they will dismiss it without a second thought. Do you really want to compete with the big studios making your first game?
  

Finally I asked one my fans, "what about the people that don't play 2D games?", His Reply was "You're not making it for them, you're making it for the people that do play 2D games."

Later he sent me an interested link, What to consider when deciding on 2D vs 3D for a game. Needless to say, since I am a one man team and want to finish and distribute a game THIS year, I have decided to create a 2D sprite based game. The fans have spoken and I have listened.


Quick fun fact: It's takes me about 80 hours or more to model, texture and rig a 3D character from scratch and only 6 to 8 hours to draw, color and animate a 2D character. With numbers like that it may take me years to finish a 3D game by myself... however if I didn't have a full time job, I could possibly finish a 3D game within a year or so.

Many of my games stories/ideas and concepts are too ambitious for a 3D game (if making it by myself), but my goals seems more realistic when doing them in 2D. This could be fun, I love animating 2D characters.

Thanks to everyone who sent messages via YouTube and email, You win. I'm doing it, I'm going 2D.
Now where did I put my wacom tablet...

Indie Games are the Future.

Over the last few years, I focused on creating high-end game graphics and effects instead of focusing on the game mechanics and creating a fun playable game. What's the point of having good graphics if the game isn't fun to play? So I am taking a step back and selecting which type of games I am going to develop first.

I enjoy playing action and adventure games as well as fighting games (with human characters), so those types of games will be my primary focus. This helps me determine the assets, tools and libraries I need to get started.

Getting Started

Action-Based games with human characters - I'll begin with character animation first.
I needed:

• Biped Rigged Character (with proportions I will use with the final characters)
• Simple Lighted Environment with a Grid Floor (helps me check for foot sliding)
• Test Animations (to test animation blending and skin weights)

I had a proxy character I used in the past, for previewing animation in Autodesk's Maya, so I modified and rigged it for games. Next I used Synapse Gaming SunBurn Engine to set the character diffuse colors, light the environment and the set the textures for the Grid Floor. Finally, I exported a few animations from Autodesk's MotionBuilder stock mocap for testing...

Animation Library Testing

The first trial run I used SunBurn's SGMotion Library, but I couldn't achieve the different blending techniques I wanted. My goal was to blend and play several animations at once to any part of the body. Animation blending would help reduce the amount of animation that's needed and save time on production. If it is possible with this library, I couldn't get it to work.

Second trial run, I used DigitalRune Animation library, although the library is still in alpha, I succeeded with the Animation Blending tests. The integrating with SunBurn and DigitalRune Animation was smooth as silk. Only setback was it takes so much code to animate and blend characters, plus the animation pipeline from the examples - merged and created huge files.

Streamline the Workflow

First I needed a few classes to help streamline the process of applying and using animations. I created a basic Actor Class to manage all skinned models, an Animation Class to control animations and a Motions Class to manage a collection of animations. These classes will easily allow me share animations between characters as well as apply, blend and transition animations.

example 1:

Actor Bill = new Actor();
Motions RunMotions = new Motions("RunCollection");
Bill.Animation = RunMotions["RunFast"];

Later, I found it more convenient to create separate Animation classes derived from the Motions Class that eliminated the use of strings to request an animation and allow faster access with less garbage collection.

example 2 (better):

Actor Bill = new Actor();
RunMotions run = new RunMotions();
WalkMotions walk = new WalkMotions();
Bill.Animate.Play(run.fast);
Bill.Animate.CrossFade(walk.fromRun, 0.5f); //float controls fade transitions

Optimize the Content Pipeline

Finally, I decided to create an animation processor content pipeline that returns a Dictionary containing the Skeleton and SkeletonKeyFrameAnimation since that's essentially all DigitalRune library needs for character animation. My approach was quite simple. I used a text file to list all of the animation folders to search for in the Game's Content Project Directory, then it created an animation collection based on the folder name and the fbx files inside it. For example the "walk" folder contains default.fbx, fast.fbx, slow.fbx., etc., will tell the processor create a new file named walk, and returns all animations found in the walk folder. Then I can load and read the new walk file with my Motions Class mentioned earlier.

Simple Method I used to return the fbx files from a directory...

private void LoadAnimsCollection(NodeContent input, ContentProcessorContext context, 
              string directoryPath, out string animsList)
{
 // directory and file info
 DirectoryInfo dir;
 FileInfo[] files;

 //animations
 StringBuilder anims = new StringBuilder();

 // load fbx files
 dir = new DirectoryInfo(directoryPath);
 if (dir.Exists)
 {
  files = dir.GetFiles("*.fbx");
  //add all file names
  for (int i = 0; i < files.Length; i++)
  {
   anims.Append(files[i].Name);
   if (i < files.Length - 1) anims.Append(';');
  }
 }
 else
 {
  context.Logger.LogWarning(null, null, 
                   "Animation Directory Not Found:" + directoryPath);
 }

 //anims list
 animsList = anims.ToString();
}

This reduced my file sizes tremendously, basically from 12mb to 400kb. Not only did this reduce build times it also allowed me to easily update and add single and/or multiple animation files much quicker and efficiently.

Here an example of Mocap applied to my Test Character.

What's Next?

Seems like a good start. Since animations can easily be applied to my character, my next objective will be to control the character movement and animation with a character controller.

First off, I have read forums and blogs about developers assuming XNA is going away and XBLIGs are dead and so forth. Is it going away? Maybe, but right now it is still here, so I'm going to use it to create Xbox360 Games until it no longer exists.

I started learning XNA back in January 2008, that was around the time XNA 2.0 was released. I remember being so excited that not only can I develop games but I could sell them on the XBOX 360 as well.

So what happened, why haven't I finished a game 4 years later?


Well, I have a salary based fulltime job in the software and technology field, so 40 hours a week always seem to become 60 hours a week - not because of bad time management, but because of overly ambitious projects and working on multiple projects. If you raised the bar once, clients and staff expect your team to keep everything at that quality and higher. I have finished dozens of projects at work and none of my personal projects.

In the beginning, I had zero knowledge about game development. I averaged about 50 hours a month of free time to learn XNA. Since 2008, I have learned so much about game dev including better object oriented design patterns, shader languages, extending libraries, developing pipeline tools, creating assets, etc. I don't regret not finishing my game, I only regret not learning how to develop games sooner. Learning XNA and C# truly has made me a better programmer.

As the years have gone by game development using XNA became easier with more tutorials, many resources and amazing game tools like Synapse Gaming Sunburn Engine and DigitalRune Game Engine Libraries (both of which I've purchased). Also, did you know someone created an Unity to XNA toolset?

Now here we are in 2012, where it seems that this is the era of Indie Game Developers and I believe game software companies agree. CryENGINE 3 SDK, Unreal Engine 3 UDK and Unity are all incredible game engines and I am looking forward to exploring all of them in the near future.


But First, I must complete my 1st objective - Finish and release a game on XBLIG.

I was frustrated in the beginning because I was trying to create just 3 levels of my game (even without the audio) under the 150 megs limitation for XBLIG submissions. That limitation has been raised to 500 megs, so now I can create and submit my game with more polish and include all of the levels.

I am really thinking about redesigning my engine/framework, because there are many areas that can be improved and optimized. Also Sunburn and DigitalRune have both integrated tools in their engines which pretty much make my tools with the same purpose practically useless.

I am planning to post my progress, solutions to technical issues and preview videos as I develop my game to encourage and maybe inspire a few indie game developers like myself. Check back later for updates.

Indie games are the future.

Almost forgot, I am now using blogger to manage my blog instead of WordPress. All of the old blog posts are gone - I needed a fresh start anyway.