XNA Spaceshooter Officially Released

Here's another cool XNA update by Origin veteran Frank Savage. Spaceshooter is a space sim minigame for Windows XP/Vista & XBox 360 patterned after Wing Commander. Frank has written a document going into detail about the game's AI, collision detection, content and future plans. It sounds pretty cool. Anyone with a Premium membership or other access want to grab some screenshots or write up a short review?

The SpaceShooter minigame is an official released version of a tutorial session Mr Frank "Savage" Savage did for the Korea Game Conference in 2008. The idea was to try and create a basic prototype of a Wing Commander-style game using XNA Game Studio.

Despite having worked with XNA Game Studio for nearly 4 years, Frank was still surprised at how easy it was to create this minigame. This represents a grand total of 25 hours of coding, finding data on the web, building a procedural star field with MapZone, and lifting the rest of content from other XNA Game Studio samples and starter kits. Add to that another 5 hours of bug fixes, FxCop cleanup, garbage collector cleanup, and writing the appropriate documents!

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Observant readers who've downloaded and played with the minigame probably noticed the stubs in the SpaceShip class for network play. My plan is to do a co-op play version where two players take on four AIs, which should make for some interesting multiplayer network code.

Once these elements are present, you have everything you need to build a real space game with multiplayer co-op, dozens of missions, and a compelling storyline. So I guess I better get those pieces built so I can start playing the great games this minigame will hopefully inspire. ;}