I finished the font this weekend. I now have a TrueType pixel font, so that’s pretty cool. It can work in all of my future games and it works in Photoshop (bonus!), so I shouldn’t have to ever have to worry about creating a font again - should save some time.

I can also totally control the color of it in game - definitely a plus.

Anyway, with the font done, it seems like it shouldn’t take me too long to put together an XNA version of the Lost Dog tech demo. My goal is for it to be exactly the same as the Verge one, but maybe with mouse and gamepad support.

We’re on our way!

So I’ve been hard at work on a new game project which I’ll announce in a couple of days probably, but for the moment I’m still working on just reproducing Lost Dog with XNA.

A big part of Lost Dog (it being a Visual NOVEL) is that there is a lot of text and where there is text in gaming there are fonts and where there are fonts there are copyright laws.

Luckily, I made my own font for Lost Dog originally, so it’s just a matter of making it an actual TrueType Font (the kind of fonts which Windows uses).

Here’s the thing:

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Let’s be honest: It looks exactly like the VERGE version except that it doesn’t have the VERGE icon and it looks like something I should have been capable of doing months ago. ¬_¬

I’m not extremely proud of the fact that it has taken me this long just to do THAT, but here’s what I can say. In that time I’ve also learned to do a lot of useless things that I can probably turn into mini-games (That’s what those are, right? Go game design!).

In any case, a lot of time is being spent “learning” right now as opposed to actually programming anything, so this was just a quick “Hey, I bet I can do this much now!”

And so I can. Hopefully next weekend I’ll get a chance to do more with it. The one thing that sort of sucks is that I’m wondering if I shouldn’t be making a version that plays in 800 X 600. I feel like it will look stupid with a ton of black space on both sides, but if I wanted to port it straight to XBox, I couldn’t with these window sizes.

That being said, there might also be some TRC issues with not using the whole window. Fear of causing black bars and burning things into screens and whatnot. Hmm.

Might have to think of a fun redesign for the interface (at the very least for the final version of the game).

Ideas are already coming…

But for now(!) bedtime. :)

So this is the first post of the dev blog for Silhouette Games and I guess I should say what I’m up to…

First and foremost, about two months ago now, I decided that I wanted to make a game of my own. I had just played 999: 9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors and had really enjoyed myself, so I decided that a graphical text adventure (or Visual Novel) as they’re currently known sounded like fun.

I didn’t want to get carried away, so I set my sights simply (for once) and made a quick Tech Demo. It only took me a few weeks to regain my bearings and do the job, and at the end of March (with a little artistic help from my friend Victoria Tao), the Lost Dog Technical Demo was made available for both PC and Mac using VERGE.

I had done it. The demo was finished, people were downloading and commenting positively, and now I could move on to just making a full version.

But I wanted to do more.

As much as I enjoyed going back to my roots and making a game using VERGE - even playing with Lua - I found that VERGE was a little too unsupported at the moment for my taste. I would have problems and there would be no one to answer them. Don’t get me wrong, I still love those guys and I think that the VERGE community is a great place for budding programmers and game designers to get their start, and I will continue to pop my head in every once in a while and possibly release another VERGE game later, BUT the technical demo had shown me that it was time to move on.

I purchased an XBox 360 (something my inner-child shuddered at) and I began learning Visual C# and XNA Studio 4.0.

Currently I’m in the middle of a book that has me making a puzzle game. My goal is to get through this book with a greater understanding for XNA programming so that I can first recreate the Lost Dog Technical Demo (for 360) and then move on to making the full Visual Novel. Given everything that I’m learning, I don’t think that it will be too difficult and I predict a late(?) June release (PC only) at the latest.

It’s a little crazy to be working on this side of things these days, but what can I say?

I hope to post more pictures if and when they exist, but for now I’ll leave you with this:

I think Moby might be the best music that I can listen to when I program. I’m listening to “In This World” right now and it’s pretty awesome.

Highly. Recommended.

Hi there, World.