XNA Game: Crazy Party Fight

In my last entry I mentioned a YouTube video of a game I had made. I thought today I would explain a little bit about that game.

The game is called Crazy Party Fight and was written in C# using Microsoft's XNA Framework. XNA is a development kit for the Xbox360 and other Microsoft devices like the windows phone. During development of this game I actually ran and tested it on my Xbox 360.

Crazy Party Fight is a party battling game for 2 to 4 players. You get points by jumping on the other players heads. Also, occasionally items fall from the sky and if a character collects one it has an effect such as shrinking the player, making them run quickly, or jump really high. Something I put much of my time into was the in game character and level editors. The idea is that players can create their own characters and levels using a collection of pre-made parts.

This game was the first major game project I made using XNA. I worked on it in my free time for 4 months one summer during second year university. The goal was to submit it to a contest by the end of the summer, not that I had a hope of winning, just so that I something to work toward, hence why in the video you see a team name.

Characters created using the character editor

This was the first game I developed using the programming skills I learned from university. All the games I had made before this I made using a graphical tool or at the most involved writing a couple of simple scripts. Everything in this game was made by me, except for audio which I obtained from online game resource sites. All of the graphics I made using the open source program Inkscape which has since become my favorite drawing program for game projects.

I have often been asked why I never finished this game. The fact is that this was my first game project and by the time I got to this point in the project the code had become completely unmanageable. The amount of time to add each new feature was growing rapidly and it was no longer worth continuing. I felt I could learn so much more by starting other projects and trying new things, instead of spending months trying to refactor all of my code and fix all the bugs.

Through making this game I did learn from my mistakes. One of my biggest mistakes was that I did not realize that you had to release the memory for images and as a result had massive memory leaks by the end. Another thing was that I spent so much time making the level and character editors that the actual game turned out not to be very fun to play.

Crazy Party Fight was in many ways the beginning of my game development projects. I will talk about some of my other game projects in future posts.