- Simple and addictive gameplay
- 1-4 players
- Runs on both XBox 360 and PC
- Entered into the Microsoft Dream Build Play competition
- Heavy use of custom shaders and post-processing techniques
Central to Encroach are the four colours found on the XBox 360 gamepad controllers - red, green, blue and yellow. The concept is very simple: players shoot bullets of any of the four colours by pressing the corresponding coloured buttons on the gamepad. The players are all located on a small central island, and encroaching upon them are a number of circle segments which can only be destroyed by being shot with the matching colour. Shooting them with the wrong colour incurs a penalty. The game ends when the players fail to destroy a circle segment before it reaches their central island.
Encroach can be played as a single player experience, or multiplayer with 2-4 players. Two and three player modes offer an interesting blend of competitive and (then when things start really start getting going!) collaborative gameplay. Four player mode provides a unique Encroach experience as each player is locked to a single colour, forcing everybody to work together to survive.
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Encroach v1.00 for Windows (3.12 MB)
Minimum hardware: Pentium 4 or equivalent, PS2.0 capable graphics card (NVIDIA GeForce 6800 or ATi 9700 upwards), 1-4 Xbox 360 controllers Minimum software: Microsoft Windows XP, Microsoft XNA Framework v1.0 Refresh (included), Microsoft .NET 2.0 SP1 |
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Encroach v1.00 for XBox 360 (1.73 MB)
Requires Xbox 360, Creators Club subscription, a PC with XNA GSE installed for deployment |
Encroach was designed and written in our spare time over a 3 week period. Originally it was meant to be one of a collection of mini-games revolving around a central theme, but we decided it was best to focus on finishing a single game to a higher standard rather than spread ourselves too thin. We hope to continue implementing the other mini-games in the future.
The circular segments that feature in the game are generated using a custom pixel shader. As well as drawing a pixel-accurate ring to any radius, the shader also anti-aliases the edges and applies slight rounding to the corners of the segments - we hate jaggies :). The game runs at a native resolution of 1024x768. An 8-pass Kawase blur is used to create the glow effect.
We needed a good solution to make the text more readable on a background of varying colours. The XNA framework helpfully provides a tool for bitmap font generation, but it is quite basic and has no support for things like outlining. We solved this by rendering the text to a separate texture, running a dilate filter over it several times and then using this slightly fatter text as an alpha channel for alpha blending the text into the final render. This effectively provides a black outline of customisable width to all the text. A bit expensive perhaps, but it looks nice and in image-space there are so many possibilities. We also use an erode filter image effect to make the circle segments disappear when they have been shot.
Encroach was written in C# and uses the XNA framework. We used Subversion for source control and Retrospectiva for project management and bug tracking.
