Last Year’s DBP

I’m Mason, one of the conspiracy’s programmers.

Last year, the conspiracy’s original members were sitting at our cushy industry jobs, in our Aeron chairs, surfing the web in between rounds of Mortal Kombat II, when we stumbled onto the DBP page. This was like, mid-May. Immediately we realized two things: a) how awesome it would be to enter the contest, and b) how little time we had before the deadline. Fortunately fact a) overpowered fact b) and in the next six weeks (!!!), we hammered out a pretty cool little 2D multiplayer “Bomberman meets Pac-man” game called Treasure Hunter. That final weekend before the deadline we stayed up all night trying to hit the coveted “60 FPS at all times” goal, because as it turns out, 60 FPS on the PC is much easier than 60 FPS on the xb360, and we hadn’t been testing on 360, and of course to submit a 2D game at 30 would just be an embarrassment. That weekend was a riot. We finally did hit 60, had roughly a 45 minute beta period, and submitted. Well, tried – as some of you guys undoubtedly remember, uploading wasn’t exactly a walk in the park that night.

We didn’t get into the finals, but we didn’t care, we were hooked, and were already talking about next year. One of the things we knew we wanted to do the next time around was to blog about the process. Fast forward to today, and here there be blog, and what better way to start it off than by sharing Treasure Hunter with the world for the first time.Screenshots:

Treasure Hunter FINAL Xbox 360 ccgame: http://www.cuttlefishindustries.com/th360.zip

Treasure Hunter FINAL PC ccgame: http://www.cuttlefishindustries.com/thwin.zip

Make sure you read the instructions before you start playing. They are in the “Help & Options” section of the main menu. It’s simple to learn, so there’s no in-game tutorial.

International Conspiracy Entertainment Formed

Welcome to International Conspiracy’s blog. This blog will chronicle our development process for Microsoft’s Dream Build Play competition. Dream Build Play (“DBP”) is a competition in which teams use Game Studio 2.0 XNA to develop video games for the PC and XBOX. Those games are then judged and winner gets a contract to publish their game on XBOX Live.

Most of Team International Conspiracy were part of team that competed in last year’s DBP competition. We learned a lot about XNA and C# and had a blast developing our game last year, so we decided to enter again this year.

To give back to the community, we decided to blog our development of this years entry. The blog will show the development process from start to finish. Hopefully this will create a forum for other teams to discuss processes they took and compare and contrast them. Additionally we will be providing some technical articles by our team members on their various specialties: tools programming, engine programming, rendering, gameplay programming, level design, character design, 2-D art, 3-D art, visual effects, music composition, etc.

Best of luck to all competition participants!