aminal

The two content creators of aminal the Christmas game are thinking of a streets of rage style beat em up for the xbox 360 indie games. This comes at a time when another game is being worked on for a final year project for an Internet degree, so development shall be slow, but with Matt designing the game and creating assets, Phil will be coding in between other projects.

Thoughts so far on collision detection are based on the x axis of the feet being within a range and then checking for actual bounding box collisions. AI on the other hand is something not even remotely thought about at this stage.

Aminal have been jamming, coming up with some stuff thats a bit more rock like than the geeky video game stuff. Havent got very far with it, but it’s a start. On the game side, i’m starting my final year project and doing another game, that will have some aminal branding on it somewhere, though this one is a 3d xna game for the xbox and is gonna be a doozy to make, 3d modelling in maya, yeah like life isn’t hard enough at the moment

Aminal are thinking about practicing and maybe writing some new material. I also want to change the recorded compositions from cubase over to logic express. Not sure if this can be done with the version of cubase matt has, but will see what can be done. or maybe just re record once i can get the setup set properly. always had a problem with levels.

saving on the xbox is proving to be harder than the code from the recipe book. basically i can’t seem to find a way to check if the storage device is the same, i can detect that one was removed, unfortunately if saving to the memory unit (MU) to begin with, if the mu is then taken out the game saves to the hard drive instead, i cant find any code to handle this so will have to do some checks the long way round, i have a solution in mind but its far from good. hopefully get this out he way tonight.

so far the aminal game for windows and xbox indie games has 3 short levels, hopefully this will end up as 7 levels and some refined gameplay over the next few weeks and will hopefully get it submitted to xbox live indie games before Christmas

myself and two loyal fans (ok really it’s one and his girlfriend) planted a geocache called the big double-ya somewhere up the country, and it’s now up on the app for people to find. basicaly this blog post is to help anyone who is looking for it from the main application and gets sent to the aminal site for help, where there is a pic in the forum at pic in the forum

i also needed to breathe some life into the blog in an attempt to help google think the site is still alive etc etc, my ranking is lame, hurrah for “bing” and “yahoo” though they got “aminal” good. hopefully the boring book i’m reading on search engine optimization an hour a day will be of some use.

once again the pressure is on with Christmas a looming and songs to be written. we’re definately behind schedule, most of the lyrics and ideas have been written, but it still needs to be put together right with music be added and the whole thing recorded. chances of a video are slim, although i have been recording anything Christmasy i’ve seen whilst out and about with the camcorder.

We tried to get some rough vocals down for “gold mountain” “edge” and “summerfields” so that mat knows how to arrange the music n stuff, but theres something that just aint right about how it gets recorded, and apparently its not just coz my voice and lack of talent. i think we using an sm57 mic and the marshall mg100dfx as a pre amp. There’s something on ebay that im hoping to pick up cheap that apparently acts as a pre amp and condensor, plus i think there was something about phantom power which i think is the key to our problamo. It’s not a great bit of equipment, i found it new for $80 online, but it would be easier to get from the uk, so ebay it is.

Looks like mat is wanting to record some aminal beauts. First on the list is gold mountain, which was originally written in like 98 or something but i gave it a rewrite this year and is probably better than what it was.

We’re also looking at recording rough versions of all songs we’ve come up with over the years no matter how not so good they are. I’m putting “summerfields” “angela” and “hail to the man” at the top half of the list, although “angela” needs a good rewrite too, better start watching some “my so called life” for inspiration, (that’s the tv series, not the band).

Other songs include “titanic” “cruise” “wild rose” “kill me” “it could happen to you” “edge” and “whore”.

Must of clock’d up about 80 hours working on the site, half or which was probably learning how to install wordpress and customise the theme with the same layout of the rest of /aminal. Anyway it is done now, it should work as i designed it to on ie7, firefox 2, and opera. Ie6 works but without the opacity settings, even though it supports opacity, it didn’t like the way backgrounds stretched and so had to be done a different way. If the background had opacity settings, so would the text within it, so no opacity. The forum is up and running, yes i know there’s no need for it, but i wanted to learn how and so i did.

I think i’m happy with the way it turned out, i’ve started reading a book on grammar but i doubt i’ll grasp any of it, and what i’ve done so far content wise could do without my wording, but i’m hoping to work on how to produce more professional like content in the future.