It's been more than a month since my last post. I have been extremely busy with college assignments. I thought today was a great day to update my blog. I am pleased to announce my first XNA Game Studio project was turned in for grading, and I would like to share it with all of you as well. The link to the file is included at the end of this post.
Klax was released in 1989 by Dave Akers and Mark Stephen Pierce. It is an action-puzzle game. My first XNA Game Studio project is a version of this game and I titled it Klax'D in homage to the original.
The game world consists of a conveyor belt, a paddle at the end of this belt, and a drop zone. The conveyor belt has five lanes. Bricks spawn at one end of the belt and move towards the end. The player can choose to catch these on his paddle or let them fall into the drop zone. The paddle can stack up to five bricks. The player can either drop the bottom brick or put the bottom brick at the top of the stack. If he drops the brick, it falls into an appropriate lane in the drop zone. The drop zone is able to hold 5 stacks of bricks. Each stack can hold 5 bricks. If a brick falls onto a stack that is full, it's game over. The player can remove bricks from the drop zone by matching like-colors. If three or more bricks with the same color form a line in any direction (vertical, horizontal, or diagonal) then those bricks are removed from the drop zone.
It's a simple game and a good one to code for a starter project. I will not share the source code for this project since I can get in trouble with the school for that, but I will be more than happy to share the finished compiled project. This game requires the appropriate .NET and XNA frameworks, which are included in the file if you don't already have them. The game will run on any Windows computer with a graphics card that is capable of rendering DX9 or higher. Please note this project is not digitally signed, so you should see a message asking if you trust the content of the file during the installation. If you are not comfortable with this, then do not install the game. There is no malware included in this file.
If you have an XNA Creator's Club membership, you can also run this project on your Xbox 360 through XNA Connect. If you want the Xbox version to try on your own console, send me an email and I will send you the .ccgame file to unpack to your Xbox.
Some of the features we focused on for this assignment were using the XNA framework to access the GPU, inclusion of very simple shaders, basic game loop architecture within the XNA framework, and using an established code base and building a game on top of that (for this project, we were given the Game State Management Sample code from the Microsoft Developer Network and used that as the starting framework). I built this game using one 3D model and added additional methods to the Screen class in the GSMS from MSDN.
Please download Klax'D from this link.
