Herriman: Under Pressure!
Herriman: Under Pressure! won the 2007 XNA User Group competition for Best Overall Game. Here is a write up of my notes and experiences of developing the game over the 13-14 days:
I knew about the competition faily late- we had quite a few days of catching up to do. We started with a frantic brain storming session that outlined some of the foundations of the game, the game mechanics, the characters, nearly all courtesy of Gaz, a talented animator on the project. The game mechanics were to later change as we saw and played the game in its development state.
The late start was compounded by the fact that I had only worked very minimally with both C# and the XNA framework, coming from a C++ background ... still I had some confidence that we could pull it off or at least enjoy trying to.
A day or to after the brain storming session we enlisted another talented artist who later came to focus on the level; its design and layout. Dave did a fantastic job on the level design, art wise and the position of the enemies and pickups. I started coding like a man possessed, starting with animated sprite and pixel collision samples. During this time I learnt/remembered how to use C# and the XNA framework, simple things like using and iterating containers! I had some dodgy collision response for a while and I was panicking a little, as it all rested on it - in the end it works nearly 99% the time which is surprising!
Some days later we recruited a sound artist, Rob that made some great music tracks and created some great sound effects, unfortunately we didn't have quite enough time to incorporate them all (or time them correctly!).
I felt my productivity was on a all time high during the next 10/11 days, I was working at every opportunity (mmm.. caffeine) coding and learning more about the framework. The only thing that let it down was time wasted on unimportant things near the end, the pressure (pun intended) was taking its toll and my fingers/brain couldn't work any faster. Its very much against me to not test a piece of software and put good error handling code in, but there was no time for it. I would have also liked some extensive gameplay testing so we could tweak all the numbers as well as the character behaviours.
I really enjoyed working on the project and gained many things from it. I think C# and development with XNA definitely allows for an ease and speed improvement in the development process, I've enjoyed using them and I'll definitely use them again.
The team did some sterling work on getting a playable, nice looking game within that time frame and I want to thank them all for there hard work; it would have been nothing without them. I'd also like to say I was amazed by some of the sound and art entries - I felt we were spoilt for choice.
Updated 27/09/09: I've updated Herriman with a few minor tweaks and bug fixes. Get it here:
Download 1
Unzip the file, then run the setup.exe installer. This will install the game on your PC and put a shortcut in your Start Menu. It should install the neccessary pre-requisites. If you receive an error when running it, make sure you have the following:
The .NET Framework 3.5 Redistributable
The XNA Framework Redistributable 3.1
If you have any problems let me know
Enjoy!
Last updated 3Last updated 27/09/09
