Ben, I have been following your progress for the last few weeks ( not in a stalker kind of way ), and thought you were crazy to write an RPG in 4 days, but full kudos to you and Christoph for getting done!!! VERY impressive indeed.

I have pre-ordered my copy of your book and I think your entry in the competition will cause your book to fly off the shelves.

Keep up the excellent work and don't get burnt out. The XNA community needs inspirational people like you.

Im totally agree with Dominique! Its blows my mind...
4 days... i can believe it

Looks really good, but why are using that crappy bloom effect on any game/demo/sample you are doing? Doesn't look good at all and would probably be better without any heavy blooming.

Looks quite impressive for a game made in 4 days...

Awesome, However I knew you're going to make it!
And that bloom effect is awesome, gives a more life to the game

I can only repeat Jason:
> Looks really good, but why are using that crappy bloom effect on any game/demo/sample you > are doing? Doesn't look good at all and would probably be better without any heavy blooming.
> Jayson

Ok, it's "art". And you shouldn't argue about art.
But it's like taking an cool "Rembrandt" Picture, a very wet sponge, and smearing with the sponge inside the picture. I hate this modern overdriven effects. My prophecy: Next step will be: special parts of the image (ca. 60%) will be downsampled to the doom1 resolution of 320x240 x 256 colors. For a realistic "old-school" effect. And then a fog post-screen effect will be added. So that the ultimate coolness has been reached: A game that looks in every frame exactly like a bunch of 8bit color smudges.

Yeah, Benjamin you will knock them all down btw I spoted you with a short video of the first running environment on youtube ;) which day is it? -> http://youtube.com/watch?v=zPGH9GlK6Wc

I downloaded this Beta demo, but unfortunatly it crashes immediatly.

Hardware Spec:

Athlon 64 3200+
1 GB RAM
Geforce 6600 PCI-X

I have all .NET framework, XNA runtime, and DX up to date.

Thanks.

Guys, if you don't like the effects or anything else in the game, why not download, change it and make it freely available like Ben has done, thus showing us all how it's done. Then we can comment on whether we like your version or not.

Well, I have to agree that there has been a lot of glow in my games lately, but if you really take a closer look at the Dungeon Quest game, it has only weak glow effects (most of it are light, fog, smoke, etc. effects and there are not post processed).

The post processing does also add a lot of noise, which might look crazy in a screen shot, but looks really nice in the game, especially if you have a big resolution.

Other than that the YouTube Video is from the version after day 1 (probably recorded at the beginning of day 2). All the monsters and the player are still missing there.

More stuff tomorrow, thanks for all the nice comments and emails.

abi

great game, some things ive noticed, walking along walls will eventualy lead you through them and you go into the void need to reset (happens to me alot)

reason it happens alot is because it is too dark (need a gamma correction) and i cant tell if i am at a dead end or need to keep going.

a garantee to walk through a wall is run down a steep slope with a high speed. so in this case its walking through the ceiling.

last thing was when you go into the big cavern, and can see past the far clipping plane, the fog is clipped as well, so there is a black blob at the far clipping plane, fog should cover the clipped void.

besides those great example game, even if it was for weeks and not just 4 days.

will you post the source code from dungeon quest too?

hi Ben,

very impressive whats possible in 4 day. keep it up.
the strange reason ur server crashed was a german tv show named neues -> <a href="http://www.3sat.de/neues/" target="neues">http://www.3sat.de/neues</a>
they sent a story about GDC and the XNA Developers Contest.
here is a deep link -> <a href="www.3sat.de/.../index.html" target="neues_deeplink">www.3sat.de/.../a>

greets, dj

thanks again

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