Background Info and Rigid Body Update

Hi, I'm John, lead developer on Xing! If you are looking for some jabber about how this game is being made, you are in the right place. Firstly, a little history.


Koriel and I started this game as a simple project for school, but once we started, we couldn't really stop. We were asked by our professor to submit our project to the IEEE GameSig competition at Chapman University. With the deadline in only a few weeks we set out to turn our map into a full fledged game. Many hours and frozen waffles later we created the land of Xing - four levels of atmospheric island goodness, and we made it as one of the top ten finalists for the competition. We created a presentation trailer and in front of a panel of industry professionals took second place in the competion, pleasently suprising us. Knowing we can do better, Kori and I decided to continue production into the summer and turn the award winning demo into a full game.

For me, Xing is the culmination of everything I love about videogames - fantastic environments, interactivity and immersion. I took a look at the moments in games that I absolutely adored, those moments where I thought "This is why I want to get into game development" and decided there is no reason why I can't make a game full of those moments right now. I'm sure if you take a look at some of the media for Xing you can name just a few of my favorite gaming moments. Xing might be my first substantial game dev project but I my goal is for no one to know that without asking me (or reading this blog). 


So with all of that out of the way, let's get into the meat and potatoes of this blog - updates to Xing! We've all been working on a TON of new features and I can't give away everything at once, so listen carefully!



Today I've been messing with a new puzzle mechanic involving rigid body constraints. I've conceptualized a puzzle involving stacking items on a button in order to weigh it down enough to trigger an event. My previous attempts at buttons involve scripted matinee sequences, but while they work great for single item buttons (like put a rock on a pedistal to trigger an event) they won't register multiple objects. After some experimentation with rigid body contstraints it looks like the button should be possible by using the built in physics engine rather then simple scripted animation, which actually should look cooler and will open up a lot of opportunities for future puzzles. I imagine sliding doors, hindged ledges and other physics goodies will show up in the land of Xing in the near future.

Keep an eye out for future updates! Development is really starting to get heated up and I'm excited to get back to work.