Avatar Trials: Ninja Uprising Moving Forward

Now that Avatar Trials: Ninja Uprising will be published on Xbox Live, we have to think about the future of Avatar Trials. Depending on how well it does we might take it to the next level. Windows has come out with Windows 8, Surface, RT, and a phone. What if Avatar Trials was ported to those systems, then...wait for it...we port Avatar Trials to the new Xbox 720/Durango! The exposure would be amazing. Windows has been shifting to the growing market and becoming more mobile friendly. This is believe is the best way to stay in business. I would think that we would add more levels, work with the art, and animations to make a better game for the port. In the meantime we need to think how are we going to make this port happen. This is a very exciting idea and I hope we move forward with it.

Avatar Trials: Ninja Uprising PASSED!

Avatar Trials: Ninja Uprising PASSED the XBLIG reivew process! We get to publish! This means that 4/26/2013 is the day of the Avatar Trials! This has been a long journey of iteration and hard work. I am very excited to see how the game is received. During the EAE demo day that was followed by 3 local news stations: See the #1 game program on the news! Fox 13:http://bit.ly/15PO9c8 , KSL:http://bit.ly/ZnoHra , DesNews:http://bit.ly/10yIHtF , we had many people play our game and there were pretty impressed! They liked the use of the Avatar, ninja abilities, levels, and the platforming. We had people play our game and beat the first level. They would then leave. However, they would come back for more! They had to beat the other 2 levels. It was exciting to see how much people liked our game.

XBLIG Review Process

Getting a game to pass through XBLIG is not always an easy task. There are an incredible number of ways to crash your game. Using xbox profiles, purchasing, demos, storage, etc. can make it very difficult to get your game published. We have gone through 2 review processes and failed. There were some interesting bugs and great comments. Things like game crashes here, camera clipping here, or even art suggestions that help the game flow better. I really think this is a great way to test your game. There is a great community of developers on XBLIG that for free will test your game and give you feedback. The catch is that they hope that you will test their game too. I hope that Microsoft does something similar to this and XNA in the future. Indie devs are the future!

Dragon Taunt

     To charm up our game I had to think of something silly that would make me laugh. Sometimes game production isn't as much fun as it should be. When I start feeling down I try to think of silly things to put in my game to make me laugh. This is when I thought it would be fun to have our normal mapping dragon reference become the antagonist. This dragon taunts you when you die. He has a list of scripted things he says to make fun of you. There are humorous and sarcastic. I found that it was a nice way of adding some charm to the game. It is also a nice little easter egg for those who know what the XNA Normal Mapping dragon is.

Music and Sound Effects

Music and sound effects are now in the game. We have a musical track, character noises, ambient/nature sounds, and UI sounds. I got most of my sounds from Freesounds.org. I then edited a lot of my sounds in Audacity(great free program). Finding a female grunt/jump noise is more difficult than I thought. Most of them were inappropriate(lol). There are lots of male noises out there, but we need more female sounds! Making the UI sounds were the most fun. I would find a weird sound and edit it in Audacity to make it sound more clear. Sound editing is totally fun!

This game has really started to come together as we near the deadline. I can't wait for our release!

New Level Screenshots

Here are some great new screenshots. I removed the player and its components to take screenshots. I only kept the player shadow so I knew where I was while I took screenshots.