But thing are moving along pretty well, albeit a little delayed (I think I’m 2 weeks off schedule currently, but who’s counting?)
One interesting little bit of fun is localization. The Dishwasher is coming out in English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, and Chinese. Since I drew my own font, I had to add all sorts of special characters to the graphic. For Japanese and Chinese I had to change the way the game handled fonts so that it could draw some using my font and others using a SpriteFont (the alternative would be hand drawing a couple thousand Asian glyphs). It took a couple of days to get everything working right with all of that, but the big hassle comes with adding changes.
To divert your attention from the late night rant below, here’s a Dishwasheriffic status update:
The Dishwasher has a million, billion bugs. I’m fixing them all very quickly.
The GDC build of The Dishwasher was sort of slow. The frame rate hovered around 30. This has been fixed–it’s now a steady 60!
I’m locking the screen size at 1280 x 720. I figured that because all of my favorite AAA games do this, I’ll do it too. This addresses frame rate fluctuations and cramped menu issues.
The dishwasher’s weapons and clothes now get stained by blood (small detail).
There is now a Ranked story mode–it’s a brutal difficulty that’s roughly the same difficulty as Samurai. Ranked is more strict, but playing ranked obviously allows you to compare score and speed against the rest of the world.
The game supports 3 player co-op in story mode (unranked only). It’s kind of messy. I’m going to make it a little less messy.
It’s been a wild ride, but I’m nearing the end of the tunnel!
Since the The Dishwasher trial went live, I’ve been getting a lot of emails from people. At first I did my best to answer them, but now I’ve been so inundated, and I’ve got so many deadlines coming up, that I figure it would be easier to just identify the common thread of questioning and answer that here!
Here are the big ones:
How do I make games?
I’d definitely recommend taking any classes if they’re available, whether you’re in high school or college. Though XNA is all C#, learning C, C++, or Java will still help to familiarize you with the basics of programming.
Also, my advice to everyone is always this: start small! Not to sound arrogant, but The Dishwasher is basically the culmination of 6 years of hobbyist game development experience; if you’ve only got a week of experience you’re not exactly going to be able to match the caliber of The Dishwasher. And forget 3D altogether if you’re just starting. Basically, if you set out to make something that would’ve been considered cool in the 80’s, you’ve got a fighting chance.
Is The Dishwasher coming out for Windows?
There aren’t any plans currently, for a few reasons. The biggest reason, of course, is because Microsoft is publishing it as an XBLA title, so I’m going to focus on that. Also, the game plays like rubbish with a keyboard, and adding support for multiple gamepads is always ugly in my opinion. The Dishwasher is made for the Xbox360 controller (though I could see the DualShock working). I also think PC piracy is a really, really, really big problem.
When is The Dishwasher coming out?
When it’s done! The XNA team and I are both breaking new ground by adding all sorts of new functionality, and there certainly is a lot to do. I’m 99.9% certain it’ll be out in 2008, but beyond that, I can’t really say anything, because it would amount to nothing more than a politician’s promise.
So there you have it! I’m always happy to answer questions, so keep ‘em coming!
George Clingerman, a Microsoft MVP who runs the excellent XNA Development XNA tutorials site, was kind enough to support my little enterprise by purchasing a Dishwashirt. Here he is:
If you haven’t bought a Dishwashirt, it’s not too late! Visit the Ska Studios store and buy a Dishwashirt today!
Also, if you have any interest in developing your own games, be sure to check out George’s great tutorials at XNA Development.
It has come to my attention that Vista doesn’t play well with my older games, i.e. everything before The Dishwasher. ZSX3/Manic Space, which I’ve ran on Vista successfully, uses DirectX 8.0, but the older ones (ZSX 1 + 2, SCZ) use DX7, and I’ve had no luck with that.
The gist is that some developers are feeling spurned by Microsoft for dropping support for old technologies, but Microsoft has stated that the technology has reached its planned end-of-life, and it’s time to move on. I tend to side with Microsoft on this one–technology does not age like classic novels. It is a shame to see old games die, but honestly–we shouldn’t have to bury each new OS release in piles of legacy support.
So, long story short, if you want to play SCZ, ZSX2 or ZSX, use a Windows 2000/Me/XP box. If anyone figures out how to get the older ones working on Vista, let me know.
Anyone keeping tabs on me will notice some things:
The original blog somehow died
The site has become extremely minimal (geocities-esque, even)
I think I know what happened, but I’m not sure. My guess is that somehow someone got some malicious whatnot on my simplePHP blog, which resulted in timeouts for any IP trying to connect to the site after the first attempt. Weeks of timeouts, even.
Well, we can all stop panicking now. I’ve decided to use a wordpress blog because it’s got a robust editor and is most likely more stable than my site.
Anyway…
The big news is that I’m going to GameFest. I’m currently in the Syracuse airport, headed West. The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai is a finalist in the dream.build.play competition, and we’ll see how it does on Monday.
For anyone who hasn’t seen The Dishwasher in action, here’s a (slightly dated) video:
