I’ve been working behind the scenes for some time now, but I hate to talk about it until it materializes into something more interesting.  I can say that it’s not a zombie game, but I think it’s going to be something that is just as fun and fast paced as you remember Zombpocalypse.  I can also say that this new project is my first move into the Xbox360 Indie Games category.  This will be my first console game in about 7 years, so I hope I still have the touch.

I’ve been procrastinating on the actual gameplay =( however, doing everything else from GUI to flow design…  I’m a still stuck on what weapons to code.  Traditional weapons, like the ones I typically like, don’t fit the theme for this new game.  It’s not exactly a place for machine guns and rocket launchers.  I hate game design some days =/.

I did add a bunch of code to start splitting the “trial ware” from the “pay” version of the game.  Right now I am thinking of limiting by the following.

• Limited play time, like 5 minutes or so (this might be automatic from XBLA’s internal trial ware delivery system)
• No saved high scores.
• The high score is capped at 100k (or some arbitrary number).  Though, if the score is not being saved, I guess this doesn’t really matter.
• No “trophies”.  Microsoft is stupid and doesn’t allow Indie games to give out Achievements, so I thought I’d have my own “trophies” and add them to the high score table somehow.  That way, other users can still see your fake achievements from the high score table.

Distributed High Scores are only possible because of a workaround that jwatte wrote.  Basically it broadcasts to the XBLA intranet that it has a networked session.  Others join the session, and their high scores get shared, storing the union of all high scores.  In theory, you will never have everyone’s high scores, but you’ll get pretty close because if person A and B share their scores and person C meets up with person A, then person C gets B from A.  They don’t even have to join your game, they just have to be online with a Gold Members account.  The network sessions are just running in the background.  Pretty genius stuff.