I’m throwing in the towel, sort of. It’s been almost 2 years since I put version 1.0 out. Now I’ve been trying to accomplish a flash version of the game with everything I wanted to do. What’s the reason it didn’t come out for 2 years even with effort put in? Designers….. For the life of me I cannot find and hold a designer to the project. I’ve had two good designers that wandered off and a series of broken promised. Mind you I’ve put about $1,000 into the pockets of designers across the internet in an attempt to make Shnazz TD 2.

Now "sort of" must make you (and potential you being the one person reading this) wonder. I’m open sourcing the entire project under a GNU GPL license. I don’t want to throw away my work but hopefully it can help out any other aspiring TD makers who can find and hold down graphic designers.

Here’s the link on source forge to the project. Here’s the link to the existing beta showing the state of the game. I’m uploading the code as I type to the SVN.

If anyone shows interest in the project I’d still love to work on it but at least maybe someone will find something useful out of this.

Lately I’ve been working on a XNA 2d framework just to make life easier for any future project of mine and for public usage. It’s at a point where I’m really happy with it thusfar.

Right now its current features are;

1. Super game management class to manage all objects/game events
2. Collision check (overridden between object) by game management
3. Super object class which is extended for all in game objects
4. SpriteObject class for single sprite objects, misc functionality like MoveTo()
5. Base GUI object class
6. Input management, instantiated by player index
7. Easy sound manager
8. GUI Objects without textures required (supports creation of square objects w/drop shadows, borders, etc)
9. Object focus system, manages focus on objects to send input updates to and who to return focus to when lost
10. Parent/child object systems
11. Used c# events for all types of actions
12. GUI system uses object attachment feature to define child gui object that are drawn within the parent GUI

What I’m planning on implementing;

1. Primitive class, for easy creation of 2d primitives
2. Simple physics systems
3. Tilemap and tile systems
4. Parallax scrolling object class
5. Misc gui objects (drop down list, age entry, text box, button, etc)

More soon

I got a few emails about TD updates so I thought I’d just stop and take a screenshot of what I was working on while coding.

What you see here may not seem like much, but essentially what I’m working on is a backend framework for Xbox/Windows games called ShnazzXNA. The idea is to allow me to rapidly develop games under the same set of code used for current and future projects. As it stands I have roughly 70% of the functionality in this framework that I used out of Torque so I’m doing well.

 The last leg before I can start migrating the gameplay code into C#/XNA from the Torque version is GUI code. XNA comes with no pre-made way of building interfaces so I’ll have to code one. Once I’m comfortable with the framework I plan on releasing it for public usage.

Excellent news, XNA 3.0 is being released end of this month (http://blogs.msdn.com/xna/archive/2008/10/14/creators-club-communiqu-04.aspx). The Xbox Live update is coming out Nov 19th.

Unfortunately I don’t think I’ll make these dates to launch ShnazzTD with this but the XNA 3.0 update will be great for development.  Especially considering I haven’t gone far enough into development to have much to worry about in upgrading ShnazzTD.

In other news, development for Xbox/Windows is going good, but I’m interested in paying for some real graphics for the game. If you are an interested designer, I’m looking to give ShnazzTD a new or better look and feel. Right now it really is something I threw together in paint with lots of clipart! Please send contact information and portfolio links via the forum shnazz.com/forums/index.php private message to Arkantis.

http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=737860&SiteID=1

http://xnalearners.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!EE8B7B839E777F0C!440.entry - Web cast with example of embedding and project source code.

I’m really bummed that you can’t use windows forms and there is no GUI interface that works on xbox and windows that is pre-packaged with XNA. Also annoying that there is no real network support for the Xbox XNA kit except using the live system. Why can’t I connect to sockets from the xbox? It makes no sense.

My apologies for the lack of updates. After getting seriously fed-up with Torque and its’ horrible localization support, I gave up on this TD for a month or two. Since then I’ve been re-evaluating the platform I wish to develop games on. I’ve finally settled on XNA for Shnazz TD and potentially PHP/Javascript for some other games I’ve been brewing in my head depending on certain factors of the XNA framework I have yet to figure out.

What this means is that Shnazz TD is going to be rebuilt from the ground up using XNA Games for Windows and developed with FULL Xbox 360 support. With the scheduled end of the year Xbox update, Microsoft said they will give developers a place to put their games on Xbox Live with a profit sharing program. I will be taking full advantage of this program! However, I love playing games on PC myself hence it will still be downloadable.

Check out this forum post: translation help. I finally got the English localization file ready. Please send me updated text or post it on the forum with what language you are translating to. I’m open to adding support for any languages so any help is appreciated. If you do help out send me your name and info so I can add you to the credits!

ShnazzTD Version 1.2 is coming along. Graphics changes, sound and music additions are complete. Right now another mode of gameplay is being developed which will hold up the release a little while longer, but rest assured it will be worth the wait.

I’m very interested in localizing the game in as many languages as possible. If interested in helping send me a private message on the forum. For starters French, German, Spanish, Mandarin (Simplified) and Japanese are languages I’m interested in localizing to. There isn’t much to change so it wouldn’t be much work at all.

Today goes live a lot of changes to the online score tracking system. There have been a few mistakes I’ve corrected and a few things I didn’t think of before. This is just the start, in the future as more scores start to come in I’ll have a lot more breakdown of ranks. Because scores on hard difficulty shouldn’t be compared to scores on easy difficulty.

So what was really changed? For starters an individual score page is now shown, so tracking scores is a tad more personal. This page is what you see first when you submit a score from the game. Some loopholes were fixed, such as having duplicate nicknames in the databases. More wording was added to the score information instead of seeing numbers (see difficulty and game mode). I’ve also modified the look and feel slightly.

Now when you submit a score you will be brought to your own personal score page. The last score you submitted will always be highlighted green wherever you see it. Once you see your own scores you can go back to see everyone’s scores then also click on a nickname to see their score page.

ShnazzTD was updated to version 1.1 today which fixes a lot of bugs users reported. Go to the downloads page to see what was changed.

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