Coding Tangent: Awards!

The PAX 10 application deadline is Saturday the 9th, and Derby (the deadline I've been using for weeks) is this Saturday. I've been working on something of a tangent to the game itself this week, the Awards system. Certainly a bad time to run the gauntlet for a tangential feature that is mere "polish" when there are bugs left on the list. However, the Awards menu items are the only remaining items on the menu that don't do anything. The PAX 10 submission wants a strong Beta, and for recent weeks I've been using the percentage of working menu items as a rough estimate of beta-candidacy. Certainly Awards are "polish", but like Help screens they help all the more with the feeling that what I'm working on is a "real game".

I'm hoping to have a chance to do a deeper write-up, if not a full fledged article on this week's work towards the Awards system, because I would like to contribute deeper to the communal spirit. Particularly because I started with a sample from Ziggyware, expanding it to better fit my needs. But also because this is one of those areas where XNA games have to fight to appear nearly as polished as the 360's in-built Achievements. Better "Awards" or whatever we call them, I think, are needed to gain some sort of legitimacy foothold with "normal 360 players". The sample I expanded upon was started in this first Awards article by Nick Gravelyn and expanded a bit in this second Awards article by Daniel Hanson.

Until I get a chance to write that deeper write-up/article I figured I would release early. Until it finds a more permanent home, here's a simply hosted AwardsDemo.zip.

I've included the ...