I've started a new game

[RCIX]

It may not seem it, but i haven't had the chance to play AI war lately. At least one of the reasons is because I'm working on developing an XNA game called Infinity (technically it's name is the infinity character, but it's a pain to type everywhere). I have a friend helping me and we hope to make a game that many people will be interested in!
(yeah, I've never been too good at advertisement type spiels)

So anyway, you can come see it at http://infinitygame.wordpress.com/ . Please check back now and then to give me feedback!

[x4000]

Very cool!  Be sure to let us know how that progresses.

[RCIX]

Thanks
I just realized i might have worded the end to be a little more demanding than i wanted -- hang on...

[RCIX]

Made a post showing off the first few screenshots (they're shrunken a little, so if you want the unshrunk version click), and providing more details about how the player will be able to customize his/her ship.

Development is proceeding at what must be a breakneck speed for most games (though not as fast as you code X ), so expect lots of blog posts!

[Buttons840]

Whats the point of exploring?  What can you find by exploring?

[RCIX]

For the first version, it will be enemies to fight (which will lead into bosses in a way i'll cover in a later blog post), but later, we plan to add interesting space anomalies that have risks and rewards associated with them.

[Buttons840]

Is there any sense of location, or will wandering straight upwards for eternity yield the same results as "exploring"?

I'm not being critical, I like space exploration games; just some things to think about.

[RCIX]

I'm considering adding a "mobile spawn point" that serves as anchor and you can move it around if you want/need to, though that would be the extent of the first version. I may also add some code that discourages just taking off in a straight line (i.e. meandering is good), depends on how complicated it would be.

[RCIX]

Sorry for the long silence, but here's a new post: http://infinitygame.wordpress.com/2010/05/17/updates/

[RCIX]

Sorry about the long dry spell again, but here's a new post: http://infinitygame.wordpress.com/2010/07/11/xml-configuration/

I'd post some code, but the free Wordpress doesn't have any good systems for in-blog syntax highlighting I might go back and pastebin a bit of it, which is a decent option anyways.

[RCIX]

I've been doing a massive amount of work lately, which you can read about at our blog, as well as our TIGSource thread. We even made a video!

[x4000]

Wow, looks like that is really coming along!  Cool video.  My one comment would be that as an observer it is hard to tell what direction you are moving when there are no referents onscreen.  Most of the time there were, and obviously I know your ship points in the direction you are moving most (all?) of the time, but when nothing is onscreen I can't tell if you're moving, sitting, or gliding backwards with momentum.  I think there would be a more visceral sense of movement, etc, if you had a parallax effect of stars / space dust going past, like a lot of 3D space games seem to do these days.  Obviously I didn't do that with AI War, but I had considered it; I think it's more relevant in an action game.

Looks great!

[RCIX]

I have stars in the background that provide a reference point, like you said with the parallax. It's just that Youtube compression erased pretty much all of them

Oh, and thanks for your continued interest!

[x4000]

Oh yeah, youtube will eat that for sure.  I realize now you had a 720p version, but I was watching in 320p.  Man, what a difference on the HD view, that's a lot more detail!  Glad the project is going well for you!

[RCIX]

Thanks! we're probably looking to have a playable beta (alpha?) in the near future, and we'd love to have you (or anyone on this forum) test the game out and give us feedback.