Yeah, so, I'm releasing Asplode! now and such. And, along with the game, comes all of the source to the game.

I originally wasn't planning on releasing the source but as development winded down and I started to play the game for longer sessions I soon realized that the game became virtually unplayable on my machine after about seven-eight minutes. I thought this may have been a result of poorly-managed graphical assets so I took a couple days to optimize them (and, as a result, the VectorModel and VectorParticleSystem bits of the code are an absolute mess to comprehend). After I finished doing that I jumped back into the game and, while it ran better for a while, the horrific mid-to-end game performance was still very much a factor. I went through and tweaked and optimized bits of code in other places that seemed like they would cause issues and, still, the performance problems persisted. At that point I decided that, since I got the game to a playable state and I didn't want to devote a whole lot of time to what is, essentially, a Geometry Wars clone, that I would just throw a main menu screen on the thing, an end-game screen, and release the source code and call it a day.

So that's what I'm doing. Here's the game; tremendous performance issues and all.

The Game: Asplode! plays out pretty much like you'd expect; on the 360 controller the left joystick handles movement and the right joystick aims/fires bullets. There is a score multiplier which is slowly increased with every kill made up to and the multiplier reaches a maximum of nine; every time a player dies, the multiplier is reset. There are also three possible weapon upgrades. (which persist after death) which are awarded based on the number of asplosion combos -- any death with a red pentabomb involved. A player has only three lives; I thought about implementing a way for a player to earn more lives but, since I have no life, the least I could do is minimize the amount of life a player can have. So there's three. That's it.

The Source: Uh. Yeah. Just try not to learn anything aside from what never to replicate. Ever.

The Requirements: One of the issues with an XNA title is that there are a few necessary items to install to get one running. So, I'm sorry about that. If it wasn't such a beautiful creation, I wouldn't use it. XNA Redistributable (Included), .NET 2.0 Framework, and I believe a run of the DirectX Web Setup and/or Visual Studio SP1 Redists if the first two don't get the job done.

Asplode!

And now off to start the game which isn't a blatant clone.