Could you describe Bloc for anyone who hasn't seen or played it yet?
Matthew: Bloc is basically a top-down shooter, but we changed how you handle firing projectiles, which we call ‘orbs’. We use the four face buttons to control firing orbs based on the color of the button, not the orientation.
If you press the “A” button, you fire a green orb, “B” for a red orb, and so on. The enemies are also in these four colors, and to destroy them you must hit it with a matching colored orb. To make the whole thing even trickier, the player uses the bumpers or triggers to rotate the guy-man appropriately.
What made you want to make this sort of puzzle game?
Matthew: We went through a lot of different ideas when we started the process. We didn’t have any real goal in mind, except a lot of our ideas seemed to focus on color matching. We thought about doing something rhythm-based, a falling block puzzler, and a few others. We finally settled on this shooter/puzzle idea, which itself isn’t too crazy.
What pushed our game into “unique” was the decision to use the colored buttons of the controller, which was a key feature in our design from very early on. That uniqueness was what we really focused on. We wanted to contribute something fresh to Xbox LIVE Community Games.
What games influenced or inspired Bloc?
Matthew: There weren't any games that we referenced or used for inspiration. The game has some obvious similarities with Geometry Wars and Boom Boom Rocket, but we didn't set out to emulate anyone. Uniqueness was a key design feature for us.
What games are you playing now (other than Bloc!)?
Nick: On Community Games, I have Being and Blow. Both are terrific games. I'm stuck on level 29 in Blow and don't think I'll ever get past it. In terms of retail games, I play World of Warcraft occasionally and Penny Arcade's On The Rain Slick Precipice of Darkness: Episode 1. And to regain a little cred with the hardcore gamers I'll at least add that I am planning on getting Left 4 Dead in the next couple of weeks.
Matthew: I loved Braid and Castle Crashers. Braid was phenomenal, and I'm always a big fan of new or interesting game ideas. I'm also a huge World of Warcraft nerd, but I take time out to try as many Nintendo DS games as possible. As for Bloc, I’ll admit that I’m not all that good at it. Nick is much better as a result of all the “testing” he did.
Is this the first game you've made?
Nick: This is really the first complete game I've made. I've worked on smaller tech demos and things for years, but this is the first really complete game I've made.
So beyond this game, other things I've made include a bunch of libraries and tools for XNA®, all of which are open source and on CodePlex. I’ve got libraries for using ZIP files, INI files, triangulating polygons, and recently a library of extension methods for XNA types.
Matthew: Nick was really the programming brains of this operation. I have dabbled in many languages, and still work in web development. In the past I wrote a program to never lose at Tic-tac-toe and I made a 2D Rubik's cube in Excel®.
What made you want to use XNA Game Studio 3.0 to make your game?
Nick: I've been on the XNA Game Studio bandwagon since 1.0, beta 2. The primary reason this platform was originally so tempting for me was being able to use managed code. By using C# instead of C or C++, I don't have to worry about loose pointers or memory management. I can write some really ugly code and know that while the performance might not be great, there won't be any memory leaks. That is the single greatest gain from using XNA Game Studio.
The other big reason was being able to make a game for the Xbox 360. Until XNA Game Studio came along, I was pretty much confined to making games for PC or Mac, when I really wanted to design games for consoles. I was always a bigger console gamer myself so it's been like a dream to be able to make a game that will run on my console on my TV in my living room. There's no feeling in the world that compares to seeing your first cornflower blue screen on the Xbox 360. Well, maybe once you get a real game up there. That's a pretty cool feeling, too.
What other tools/programs do you use to help you make your games?
Nick: We used Photoshop and Paint.net for the art and Audacity for audio editing.
Other than you two did anyone else help you out?
Nick: Three officially, but we had a fourth help out with Bloc. I was in charge of all the coding. Matthew is the art/design guy who pretty much singlehandedly came up with the original concept for Bloc. Our younger brother Joe was the user experience guru and QA expert. Our fourth member was Matthew's girlfriend Che who assisted in a lot of the art direction decisions.
Matthew: We couldn't have done it without a tremendous amount of help and support. Che and all our friends had their two cents’ worth thrown in at some point.
How long did it take you to make this game?
Nick: We spent about four months getting Bloc ready for Dream-Build-Play. Once we submitted that version, we spent another couple of weeks tweaking some settings, converting to 3.0, and doing our final testing. It probably took a total of just under five months of work.
Can you walk us through a usual day for you and your team?
Nick: We all have day jobs and Joe lives in Michigan so we don't really have a usual day. Most of the work comes when we get free time. I generally spent nights and weekends getting the code worked out, Matthew and Che got the art done whenever they weren't working, and Joe would usually find a few moments between work and school to break the game and tell me what we were doing wrong.
Do you have any ideas, wishes, hopes, or dreams for anything XNA Creators Club could do or provide to be even better?
Last I checked Community Games was up to 60 games and counting [Ed. now over 100!!]. In just a couple weeks, the community has created over one third of the number of games on XBLA. Pretty soon users are going to need to have a way to find, and to help others find, the games they want to play.
And of course, more exposure so we can have even more people finding out about all the cool games the Community is making. There are some truly wonderful games up for download and I think more people need to know about them.
What’s next for you?
Nick: We're currently working on designs for some possible games right now, so we'll be diving in to get another game ready for the spring or summer of 2009. The games are all looking to be quite different from Bloc which should make them fun for us to make and fun for gamers to play.
Matthew: We want to go in a different direction than Bloc with our next game. Bloc was a really interesting diversion from your average game, so we wanted to make a more consumer-oriented game next…something that ‘s familiar, but with our signature twist on it. We also want to work on promoting our site, which is still in progress, our blog, and the upcoming game.
