Hi!

I hate coming on to a new forum to shill, but it was suggested I check out devmaster over at stackexchange.

Before we get to that, I'll try to honor the forum by talking about the tech in our game, Creatures & Catacombs: Fulgrim's Quest. This is a side-scrolling 'brawler' in the vein of Double Dragon, Golden Axe, or Castle Crashers. It is built using XNA 4.0, C#, and MSIDE 2010. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to post or PM.

At a high level, the system is a collection of "managers" (with GameManager as the king) which are implemented both as 'singletons' and XNA components. This is so they receive the elemental (my word) XNA functions that are called every cycle: Update and Draw as well as the universal 'start up' function LoadContent. If a manager wants to 'listen' to the input queue, they register a delegate.

The AI system is a 'Action Selection' type where an AI performs a given task (movetoattack, flankabove, etc) for a given time or till specific conditions are met. After this, they 'request' a new task from the AI manager.

Rendering is handled by an extremely modified tile renderer based on Nick Gravelyn's design. Because of this, we can build the levels in TILED, then import the data via a custom XML file reader. Here is a screenshot of a in-dev boss in our test area:



We chose this tech to target both the PC and XBox Indy but...MS kind of buried XBI during our dev cycle. We are also working on some 'more natural' looking environments and features.

Shill mode: We have a playable demo and just launched a Kickstarter campaign because we need some new hardware. The sprites are created from 3D renders and our rendering rig is maxed out. in fact, it crashed several times while rendering out the above Snake boss (I am not the Artist, so the details are lost on me). My compile times are growing almost daily with them approaching 'go get lunch' on full release builds (pipelining the assets is a killer). The page (and demo) can be found here: http://www.kickstart...-fulgrims-quest

Again, if you have any questions feel free. Thanks for your time!

-mike