Epsicode – Little Gamers: Teh Game

Hello everyone (yes, you, the only person in the room, in the dark corner!) !

Wow, it’s been a while since I’ve updated this page…
Mostly because there was no progress since the GDC demo, as Microsoft has yet to allow Belgium to publish XNA games on the indie channel (boooooh!), which means I had no real motivation to continue. But recently they’ve added Sweden to the white list, which is where the LG guys are living, meaning that we can finally publish a game!
But I did not slack either, and decided to concentrate my XNA work in the meantime on writing a fully fledged 2D game engine, that could be re-used between different projects. So was “IceCream” born, in cooperation with conkerjo :)

What I now have started is a new LG game, scratching the first version as there was almost nothing I wanted to salvage from it, and I am fully aware of the short comings that the demo was suffering from (mainly the linear and flat gameplay), while also knowing what could make the game fun to play.

Here is a video of the new engine technology at work, a ragdoll system for realistics deaths:

It’s also a big change in my life today as I’ve decided to pursue indie game development as a full time career, meaning that I will quit my job somewhere in 2010, and will work part time until that point, to fully concentrate on Little Gamers and other games, and not only on XBOX360 *wink wink nod nod*

Wish me luck :)

Here’s a link to screenshots of the game! (Please note that the robot levels now features soliders with more diversity !

Fantastic news today!

The Little Gamers XNA game is now available for free download on XBOX Live!!

I’ll blog more in depth about this later, now I’m busy dancing around while cheering ;-)

Hey guys,

I’ve packaged a new installer for Teh Game’s demo.
This installer contains the XNA and .NET library in case that you would be missing it (most of you would need XNA anyway).

Here is a link to the game’s demo: download (66MB)

Have fun!

So this is it !

I’ve finally put together a PC version of the current advancement of the Little Gamers game.

Enjoy the demo (deleted, use the .msi demo instead)

Please e-mail me all your feedbacks ! :) (and bug reports)

Oh and before you launch it, be sure to take a look at the readme for the links, because you need .NET 2.0 and XNA 1.0 installed to be able to run the game (aswell as a GPU with 2.0 pixel shaders min.).
And since i’ve had a few people complain about the game crashing at startup (which reminds me that it was a good thing to have submitted a XBOX360 version to the contest instead of a PC version, since none of those crash problem are related to my game !):

1) Try to place the game’s folder in C:/ (there is a .NET bug with foreign languages that crash the program if placed in special user folders like Desktop)

2) Make sure that you’ve actually installed DX9, .NET 2.0 a and XNA 1.0 Refresh.

3) I did that on a PC of mine and it fixed the prob (so try it even if it sounds cheesy): re-install graphics driver, uninstall XNA then .NET.
install DX9.0c August, install .NET 2.0 and finally install XNA 1.0 Refresh.

Little Gamers has won 3rd place at Microsoft’s Dream, Build, Play challenge ! It was even featured on 1Up :)

Unfortunately, it didn’t won a XBLA contract… Who knows, maybe a publisher fell in love with the cute be deadly look :D
By the way, if you were at GameFest and you did play my game, please leave me a mail with your comments at loic@epsicode.net .

Some pictures taken by The_ZMan at Microsoft GameFest 2007:

So my game’s first prototype is finally finished, with 5 levels available. It was submitted to Microsoft’s contest Dream Build Play.

Here’s a video:

And they are some screenshots @ Ziggyware