John Zeitler

Today, my Xbox/Games For Windows Live Gamerscore exceeded 7000 points. The achievement that put me over this plateau was “Rant All You Will (30G)” from Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II. My current count for achievements is 382 individual achievements across 63 games, totaling 7025 points. The average value of each achievement is 18.39 points, with an average count of 111.51 points per game (Xbox.com reports 19.79% completion, with two fully-completed games). It took 105 days to reach this point from the previous plateau of 6070 on January 3rd, 2009. 56 achievements were collected in this time, totaling 955 points, with an average value of 17.05 points, and a collection rate of one achievement every 45 hours.

Okay. I spent a bit more time working on the game last night, but today’s progress– even thus far– has been tremendous. I’ve got a preliminary loading screen, I’ve got things set up for dynamic loading (read: loading only what you need for the scene ahead of time, then unloading only that when switching scenes), I did up the character positioning setup and drawing code AND created artwork for the demo characters…

…and I got it running on Windows. It’s optimized for 720p right now (which means it’s WAY too big for average screens), so my biggest problem right now is getting the art rescaled to a standard size for the Windows version. I also have to set up an alternate control scheme, as I’m not going to demand that the people I’m giving this to have 360 controllers attached to their computers. Overall, I think I’m about 6 more hours away from a publishable alpha game (I chose not to put any music in for this alpha, beyond some sounds that will probably need to be replaced).

Those six hours are going to be next weekend, folks– I’m going to go enjoy the rest of this one, now that I can.

I feel like Rocky Balboa climbing those steps in Philadelphia right now. Seriously, the sense of accomplishment I’m getting just from having gotten this far along in development of the XNA project has me incredibly psyched, even as it’s slowly sinking into my subconscious that I have a hell of a long way left to go. Still, as the video below adequately demonstrates (despite my rambling), my C# skillz are getting stronger.

Today, my Xbox Gamerscore exceeded 6000 points. The achievement that put me over this plateau was “Hack A Turret (10G)” from Bioshock. My current count for achievements is 326 individual achievements across 58 games, totaling 6070 points. The average value of each achievement is 18.62 points. It took 51 days to reach this point from the previous plateau of 5125 on November 13th, 2008. 48 achievements were collected in this time, totaling 945 points, with an average value of 19.69 points, and a collection rate of one achievement every 22 hours and 35 minutes.