Bear Studios

Course of Action after the long weekend:

• We should all install Microsoft Visual C# 08 Express + XNA Game Studio 3.0
  • Dennis and Chow will help install these on several PCs in Media Lab 2 (yay)
• Still PC development with plans for 360 porting but we should still try to loan out a 360 from school to test porting early on.
• Complete the tutorial from Innovative Games shape up the engine
• I believe the Creators Club paid account by the school should give premium download access, should try to get our hands on both Robot and Ship game
• Discuss, re-evaluate and streamline what we want. Should aim lower and finish a complete game. We can always go back to rework on it after the semester.
  • This means revising our product and release backlogs.
• Arrange meeting with Claude on Thursday

Reference Books

Went to Clementi Book Store to look for reference books. Tenatively we will be deciding on this book: Microsoft Xna Unleashed : Graphics and Game Programming for Xbox 360 and Windows.

Game Engine

We took a look at a few ready 3D XNA game engines, but could not find a suitable one. We decided to use the tutorial for building a 3D XNA game engine at http://innovativegames.net/ to start a game engine from scratch. This will enable us to understand the internals of a game engine better.

Follow-up

Platform

School only has 2 Xbox 360 for possible loan. Anselm’s still on the way. I might be able to loan one from friend who works at Microsoft. We’d try to develop for PC with Xbox 360 controllers first. At least for initial few releases until we can settle deployment problems for the Xbox. Worst case scenario would be to fully develop on PC and port to 360 at the end of the day.

Meetings

Meeting timing with Dr Ashraf is tentatively set for Thursdays or Fridays. To check with Claude.

Game Design

To-Do

• Check pricing of Xbox controller + bluetooth dongle
  • Update: 75.90 per piece w/o dongle
• Arrange fixed timing for meetings with Claude & Dr Ashraf as well as free time for group programming/discussion. To be confirmed once tutorials are allocated.

Release 1 planned