Today it dawned upon me that I forgot something important in the geometry generation engine of my game: How can the player distinguish the goals from the traps? Both are holes, only that the former one makes you win the game while the latter one makes you lose the game. Oops! :)
After today’s changes, the maze consisted of three parts: The walls, the floor (with donut gaps around holes that are goals) and the goal rings. The goal rings fill the gaps left open in the floor and use a different effect that draws a checkered flag texture so the player can clearly recognize the goal holes.
All that’s left now is to polish the game a bit, add gamepad support and create the 10 challenge mode levels. Looking back at the progress, I have to say that I underestimated the amount of work required quite a bit. It’s great to see some interest from the XNA community, some people have linked me in their blogs and I even got interviewed about my game and my thoughts on XNA. More on that if everything works out as expected.
The release of “Project Balance” will be on December 11th the same day the XNA final is due.