Till The Fat Lady Sings

It’s amazing how so some many things don’t meet deadlines, when you’re an indie dev-team. So here I am posting a message to let you guys know we have not stopped. We all have to work part time jobs to keep us alive, and it has got to the stage where most of us are now just waiting.

As they say in theatre – The show must go on, and it’s not over till the fat lady sings. We don’t have fat ladies in our team just yet, but we are looking….

Caution: Men at Work

I know it might not seem like it by looking at this site, but Perplex Beats has changed a great deal since the version that was sent to Dream-Build-Play. A new puzzle element has been added, so expect that to be featured in the next video.

The puzzle tracks for the game’s 10 songs are being finalized, placeholder art is going out, and the whole game experience is coming into place.

If there’s one thing I regret its that its taken this long to get another video out there, but we’re hoping to have one made up soon.

GS 3.0!!!!

Upgrading Perplex Beats wasn’t so bad. For anyone still having issues with it; a lot of times the error you’re getting has nothing to do with the problem. That’s especially true for those weird XML Error messages originating from the textures of models. Go through every Content Pipeline Extension project and check the Version Property on the project references Microsoft.Xna.Framework, Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Content.Pipeline, and Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Game. If the property is 2.0 delete the references and use the Add Reference window to insert the 3.0 versions of those dlls.

Rebuild the solution and if your dependencies are working then everything should sort itself out from there.  Otherwise you may have to build each project by hand in order from Library projects, CP Extensions, then Game projects.

In development news, I’ve finished the second Track Editor for designing puzzle tracks in Perplex Beats. Apparently the first one was too scary to be used, so I’ve created a second one with lots of attractive pictures to appear less frightening.

Now with attractive pictures!

As an aside to anyone else working on making WinForm Editors for their game content, I highly recommend the IntermediateSerializer for serializing the editor data into XML. The job was much simpler than my toils with the XmlSerializer on the first Track Editor.