To create a new playable game project (windows / XNA), I first needed to refactor "Homeless Guy" ('HG'). Homeless Guy is another game i've been working on for almost 3 years now. Some of the systems in HG needed to be promoted to common libraries. I made the mistake of not properly doing that with Alpha Chimp, an older game, and as a result, three games have had to reference an AlphaChimp library for some systems that belonged in a common library.
Once systems were available from proper libraries, I just duplicated Homeless Guy directory, and renamed everything KillBot. Then I removed all the Homeless Guy specific stuff. This seems like a terrible way to start a new project, but in the Give Up Games platform as it currently is, any game needs X amount of implementation code. Might as well start with some existing and working implementation code. The first step of refactoring helps ensure that the code being duplicated is truly only that implementation code.
I set up a new "project" in the Scene Designer. This is as easy configuring all the required paths for the Scene Designer to work effectively. Any time after that, I can easily open the scene designer, and choose to work on either Kill Bot, or Homeless Guy, without having to fuss with settings.
All the content from Homeless Guy was copied over. The engine requires some content, and some of the Homeless Guy content may be useful as placeholders. I still need to go through and trash the 90% of content that will never be used.
Next up, i want to focus first on wiring up a First Person camera, and implement a controller scheme. The engine supports "pluggable controller schemes" to parse and react to user input. Lots of controller logic is abstracted so I won't need to do much else for control. After that, I will throw together some basic "Test level" in the scene designer where I will live for the next few months while I implement a new Artificial Intelligence on large number of NPC's.
Maybe I should have started with explaining what kind of game Kill Bot is.... It's a first person shooter where you kill a bunch of robots in a robot factory. I'll explain more later.
