I’ve had this idea for quite some time, and now it seems like I’m going to be able to accomplish it.
Since the last Devmania I’ve been quite satisfied with the tools I’ve used to develop Angry Pirates, but it was a single player game. I want to use C#, XNA, Farseer Physics and eventually GLEED2D again, and I want to develop a PvP (player versus player) game on one single machine. Forcing two players to squeeze their fingers on one keyboard or splitting controls to two different input devices (one keyboard, one mouse) was never appealing to me.
When I found out about the PlayStation Move Controller, I fell in love with it. A friend of mine had two unused ones at home, and he kindly borrowed them to me. Summed up quickly, it has a RGB LED, vibration support, 8 buttons, accelerometer, gyroscope and many other features. It can be connected to the PC via 5-pole USB mini-B cables and via Bluetooth.
In theory, yes. And in practice, too, after a lot of googling, debugging and trial&error. Suffice to say, that thanks to Thomas Perl and MotionJoy I now have a working C# sample application displaying me live sensor data and allowing me to control the LED and vibration of both PS Move controllers at the same time.
First milestone accomplished. Now it’s time to think about possible game mechanics!
Angry Pirates is very impressive for such a short development time. Good fun to play too. A two player version would be great. It would be nice if the cannon balls bounced too, especially for multi-player. I’ve never used Farseer Physics, is it similar to Box2D and Chipmunk?
Yes, Farseer Physics is based on Box2D, but is implemented in C#. It also contains more features than Box2D, it’s really easy and comfortable to use. I indeed believe that multiplayer games can be more fun, so that’s what I’m going to try this year!