Starting with the beta launch of the Xbox LIVE Community Games service later this spring, subscribers of the XNA Creators Club will be able to submit their own game creations for self-distribution through to Xbox LIVE Marketplace via the http://creators.xna.com website. A community of their subscriber peers will be given a chance to download, play and review the game and its content for appropriateness and conformance to the service’s TOS. Should it pass, the game will then be added to the global games catalog on Xbox LIVE Marketplace and available to gamers worldwide connected to Xbox LIVE.
More info here...
Now a hobbyists like ourselves need not secure a publishing contract just to give the XBOX version of our game away!
7 comments:
Excellent, excellent game! A few suggestions (I'm sure you've already thought of these, but just to put them out there):
- Multiple opponents (computer or human): I want to see cool colors all over the map
- Large maps / random maps (goes without saying)
- I'd like a mode sort of like Risk 2100, where you get 'cards' for conquering lots of territories in a short amount of time; cards could be triggered with # keys (this would be separate from 'regular' mode)
- Continent bonuses (Risk style)
- I second quick access to satellite, no-brainer feature IMO
- Sound :)
All in all, I'm impressed. Conquerator is much better than today's offerings. The only one I really liked was Proximity HD, which funny enough, is also a 'territory' game like Conquerator.
Can't wait to play this on my Xbox :) I'm excited by the news as a player and as a developer. I'm working with Flash right now but would definitely consider porting a successful game to XNA. Great news. Hopefully we can make some money as developers with the service.
Keep up the great work, I look forward to the next release!
Just to clarify the 'cards' idea, if you're not familiar:
The cards have various effects when played; in Conquerator, it might be stuff like:
- Instant deployment from satellite for 10s
- Increase defenses at selected location by 5
- Temporarily increase offensive power, etc...
Stuff like that. The idea is that it awards players for being aggressive and not turtling.
Just my 2 cents.
Hi Eric,
Thanks for the encouragement and suggestions! The cards thing in particular is very interesting, and not something we had thought of.
The continent bonus is basically implemented in our multiplayer version, which (fingers crossed) should be running in the demo area at GDC today. In it, each continent contains a 'supernode', which produces more resources than normal nodes. These are positioned so that owning the whole continent is the best way to defend them.
Having continent 'capitals' sounds great!
I was thinking another cool thing would be a stats / timeline thing at the end of the game like you usually see in RTS games. After I finished Conquerating, I was curious to see what time was the turning point in terms of my strength vs. my opponent's.
I'm a sucker for all those stats -- total armies over time, % soldiers deployed, # territories owned, soldiers lost, etc...
On a random note, I found this game through Kotaku so hopefully that got you guys some traffic :)
You should specify the InvariantCulture when parsing numbers to strings. On most non-English systems, the decimal separator is ',' which causes your application to crash.
Hey mate, sick game love it. Also its been like 2 years so i'm guessing theres no new development, so... is there any chance this will go open source to allow others to add new features.
Cheers mate.
Truly glad to hear you've enjoyed it!
You're right that there's probably nothing new coming, at least not anytime soon. We've tried various changes and enhancements over the last couple of years. We've built 3d-spherical terrain generators, added PvP, etc, but we never got anything we were happy with. It's probably mostly been a "sights set too high" kind of issue, but at this point I'm a just tired of beating my head against it. I have another project that I'm working on now in any case.
We'd definitely consider sharing the code with someone that wanted to do something with it. Drop me a line at nick@dollarshortgames.com if you'd like.
Post a Comment