Good Morning Gato #76 – Crouching Neko, Hidden Gato

Gato is really weird. That’s all I can really say. She spent 15 minutes attacking the fringe of the rug with all her might and then spent the next five furiously trying to get under it. She seems to have won whatever imaginary battle was going on.

WPCentral on the Zombies!
James here. We were fortunate enough to do an interview with the kind folks at WPCentral about our upcoming semistellar shooter Z0MB1ES!!1 (on teh ph0ne); wouldn’t you like to give it a read?

Over 9000
In the universe of Charlie Murder there is an energy known as Anar-chi. It flows through all things awesome, be they awesomely good or awesomely evil. It can be harnessed by the power of rock and roll to perform devastating attacks, heal up ailing bandmates, or launch some of these brand new team combo attacks that were totally missing from our PAX build! It’s very Simpsons arcade in execution, but very tactical in intent: any bandmate combination is possible, but team attacks use up a healthy amount of Anar-chi and some are more specialized than others. I foresee much tweaking with this, but preliminary report is: I love it.

XNA’s not Dead!
With lots of Windows 8 news coming down the wire, probably the most doom-laden bit was that there would be no XNA in Windows 8. Well, that’s not totally true. XNA games on PC (like Bastion) will continue to work on Windows 8 exactly like they do on Windows 7, but if you want to make a Metro-style app, XNA is out.

So what of XNA’s future? You might say I’ve got something of an interest in XNA’s long term plans. XBLA is overwhelmingly C++/DirectX, but a handful games (like ours!) are XNA. For a Comp Sci grad, I’m stupidly inexperienced in C++, so XNA has always been more or less a godsend to me. The launch of Windows Phone 7 with XNA as the primary game development framework struck me as a signal that XNA wouldn’t be going away any time soon. So, with the announced absence of XNA support for Metro apps in Windows 8, has doom been prophesied? Who knows! Whatever the case, there’s sure to be something out there for C++ newbs like me. In the meantime, I’ll just keep plugging away on the XNA awesomeness that is Charlie Murder and Z0MB1ES! Cause XNA’S Not Dead!