kodu

March 2009 - Posts

New Feature: Camera Verbs

For a long time we had all the camera controls in the 'tweak screens.' You could say things like "automatically follow any user controlled character" or "never follow this character with the camera."

The complications on this were subtle and annoying. Among many minor issues, it was actually very complicated to give the user an error message when they had presented conflicting camera options - such as being in first-person yet following a character with the camera. Because this UI was spread across different places, you never had all the conflicting instructions in one place. Even worse, things that your characters could do during gameplay could create the need for some errors to pop up in the middle of the game.

What we finally decided is to move part of the camera system into the programming language so that characters can either attract the camera, be ignored by the camera, or become the camera. You can still disagree with yourself, but you're in control of when things happen so it'll be more understandable in the flow of creating behaviors. For example, if one character asks to be the camera and then another asks for the same, it'll make (slightly) more sense when you only get the latter. We hope Wink

Scoy also got in the fixed-angle camera, which is crucial for us fans of the side scrolling classics (scramble, anyone?) It's also great for level design where your level is only pretty if you're looking in a certain direction.

To test this out, I'm working on a level reminiscent of a classic arcade game where you drive around in a jeep (or, in this case, a puffer fish) rescuing prisoners from burning buildings. Ahh, the classics...

 

Posted: 03-30-2009 2:06 PM by mattmac | with no comments |
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Welcome to the Kodu Blog

It is well past time that we began sharing more of the behind-the-scenes action at the Kodu factory. So here we are. This will be a team blog and you should see a few updates from behind the scenes. We are actively working towards a spring launch for Kodu on the XBox Live Community Games Channel.

Nice to see you here! We're quite a small team and we take our public very seriously. Give us your thoughts - you may be able to influence the product more than you realize.

UPDATE: This is a pretty old post. The Main page of blog is here.