Saving and Marketing

While the conversion of the game to the 360 is 'over', along the way I tore up all kinds of things getting the game to work on the console. Among those was the ability to save and load game data. The game records data such as what level you've reached, what levels you've beaten, how many times you've taken a given path, what Operatives you've rescued, etc. Saving still worked fine on the PC, I just delayed making it work on the 360. Earlier this week, the time had come to fix it.

XNA made it fairly easy to save/load game data on the 360. Since I was already using a filestream on the PC, I was able to simply cut the saving and loading code out and place it in a separate function to run on the PC and Xbox. From there the PC and Xbox needed individual wrapper functions. The Xbox function was easy to setup using the StorageDevice. Before saving the first time the player has to choose a storage device (such as a hard drive or memory card). The snag I ran into was when I tried opening the Guide to have the player choose the device, it never showed up! It turns out help documentation in Visual Studio didn't mention that XNA auto-picks a device if you have only one, and never shows the Guide. I would have known this if I were using the msdn help because a user comment there explains this auto-picking behavior and links back to the XNA forums. That'll show me for thinking I can live without the internet!

Marketing for Weapon of Choice starts soon! While MBG has very little money for marketing we do have lots of moxie, and vim, and chutzpah and other descriptions that make it feel like we're working on a silent film instead of a video game. Those adjectives combined with elbow grease, knuckle cracking, and sweaty brows have created a really sweet trailer for the game! Sadly, not all the stars have aligned for it be uploaded yet, but that time will come very soon, along with several gorgeous screenshots and a snazzy new homepage. Yippee!

And just to spice up this entry a little and reward anyone that read to the end, I'll throw in this sketch of a very large creature in the game. He's all in pieces here, but through the magic of video games he'll come to life, right on your screen! Then he might crush you with his hooves.