2009.174 (June 23, 2009)

Frank Savage at the PDC

This one is a cool video of Frank Savage's presentation to the 2008 Professional Developer's Conference on the abilities of the XNA Creator's Kit. He's wearing a totally badass TCS Victory (WC3 dev team) t-shirt and mentions Wing Commander at the outset.

At about 11 minutes in he mentions being a big Wing Commander fan and then goes on to demonstrate a space game he's been working on with the XNA toolset. It's probably similar to the one he did a tutorial of at the Korea game conference for which the source code was recently released.

Grab the whole video here! (324 meg wmv)

Making the Game: What's Bad for Gameflow?

This is an interesting document. One thing Wing Commander IV's development lacked was good communication between the group shooting the film segments and the group in Austin tasked with tying everything together in to a game. As a result, a lot of little things were missed that couldn't be fixed later -- sets weren't built/lit with gameflow menus in mind, moving "postage stamps" of the actors weren't shot, etc. For Wing Commander Prophecy, this list was created to avoid those issues happening a second time.

These updates are thanks to John "Captain Johnny" Guentzel, who provided several CD image archives of material used by the Wing Commander Prophecy development team!