Man Eating Space Iguanas for Windows Phone 7

Man Eating Space Iguanas, or MESI for short, is the first game that we are developing here at Madnight Games. It will be released for Windows Phone 7 and is a tower defense game.

The main aim behind the game is to survive as many waves of MESI as possible until they manage to eat all of the citizens in your town. There are various different types of MESI, and various different types of turrets that you will be able to purchase to stop the MESI reaching your town. All of the different types of MESI act differently to the different types of turrets that the player has available.

With each passing wave there will be more MESI to deal with and the chance of seeing the more powerful and rare MESI will improve with each wave. We are hoping that we can bring a tactical but fun and addicting experience to the players of MESI but we won't know how it's going to pan out until we release the game to the public.

The development cycle on MESI has been very short, and we have only been working on the game for about a week now. In that short space of time we have got the following features implemented: Rendering, message system, MESI movement, MESI health, turret placement, turret aiming, turret firing, projectile movement, projectile collisions, applying damage on projectile hit and finally on the fly path finding. In the following screenshot you will see the game running with placed turrets and the calculated route to the exit (green tiles), the graphics being used at the minute are place holders and do not reflect what will be seen in the final game.

The progress of MESI so far, with turrets placed and the calculated exit route.

Over the coming weeks we will be working on implementing a GUI, the wave system, cash system, different types of MESI and turrets and most importantly, making MESI move along the calculated exit route.

It might take us a while to balance out the turret vs MESI damage, projectile speeds, MESI speeds and turret/MESI abilities but once we get there we will be well on our way to releasing the game.

The most important thing for us is keeping the game entertaining for players and that is where waves, score and cash come in handy. We will be using these to give the player something to aim towards. Aims such as, beating their friends high score, their friends highest wave and earning money to be able to unlock the more powerful and resistant turrets.

That is all we have for you now but stay tuned as we will be sure to let you know once the game has been finished and is available for download on the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace.

Madnight Engine - Primitive Shapes

An engine, something every game needs to function correctly. Some companies like to outsource their engine and some companies will create an in-house engine. We are the sort of people that like to get things done ourselves and that is why we are developing the Madnight Engine, or MNE for short.

The MNE is completely written from scratch using the C/C++ programming language. With the MNE we are aiming to create a flexible engine that will work across multiple platforms for multiple types of game. We want to be able to use MNE whether we are making a 2D game, a 2.5D game or a 3D game.

Eventually, we want the MNE to be able to use multiple rendering devices, starting with OpenGL and eventually moving on to DX9/10/11. We are using OpenGL as our main rendering device as this gives us the most flexibility when it comes to porting the MNE to different platforms and/or different operating systems.

Without going into all the nitty gritty stuff we are now at the stage where the engine can draw primitive shapes to the OpenGL rendering device, process input from the operating system and plug into in another project, such as a game, easily. This will come in handy for making technical demos and getting started on the actual games that will be using the MNE.

The Madnight Engine is capable of drawing primitive shapes (Triangle, Square, Rectangle)

Once we knew that we could get the engine to draw primitive shapes, we then proceeded to add a simple "look at" camera, enabling us to see the shapes from any point of view that we required. However, for us to actually get this working as intended, we needed to start creating 3D shapes so that we knew the camera was doing what it should be doing.

This was our next step, and within a couple of hours we were now able to create 3D versions of the primitive shapes with ease.

After a little bit of work, we were able to turn our 2D primitives into 3D shapes

Now able to properly test our camera, we added in camera movement using either the keyboard or mouse whilst the program was running. However we weren't satisified with that, as we had to choose between using 2D and 3D shapes before the program was compiled. The last thing we did was to add a toggle into the engine so that, at the touch of a button, we could switch between drawing simple 2D shapes or 3D versions of these shapes.

That is all that we can bring you for now, but hopefully it gets you interested in what the MNE has to offer for our games. We will update our blog once we have some more solid progress in development.