AngelXNA spreads her wings!

Jeff Ward and I are proud to announce today that we’re officially presenting AngelXNA 1.0 to the world.

AngelXNA is a game prototyping engine built upon Microsoft’s XNA framework. It offers all the power of XNA, plus several key features including:

• In-game interactive Console (ala Quake/Half-Life)
• Super-simple Logging (to system, Console, and/or files)
• Basic Actor framework
•   Layers
•   Texturing with transparency
•   Data-driven Actor generation (Actor templates + “level” files)
•   Interval-based transitions, such as color, size, rotation, and positio
•   "Animations" (texture swapping at defined intervals)
• Messaging system (global switchboard)
• Config file processing
• Event-driven input from a mouse, keyboard, or Xbox 360 controller
•   Binding inputs from a config file

What’s a prototyping engine?

The idea behind AngelXNA is to provide a game prototyping framework that will help amateur and professional game developers alike with prototyping game ideas. With AngelXNA, we’ve tried to take away a lot of the boring, unnecessary work that goes into making any game, even a small one meant merely as a proof-of-concept or prototype to explore a single or small set of game ideas.

Ready to get started?

For you brave hackers, here’s the 1.0 tag for the project. You can grab the project using Mercurial or just grab a zip/gz/bz2 file from the “get source” dropdown in the menu.

The documentation is hosted on the project’s wiki.

Version 1.0 is, of course, meant for true early-adopter types. We’ve written up high-level documentation that is commensurate with that of the original Angel engine itself.

For version 1.1, we plan (so far) to have pathfinding working (possibly in addition to some other simple AI routines), but more importantly, we’re hoping to get feedback from our early adopter users on how to improve the documentation of AngelXNA and of course the engine itself.

Have fun and please let us know what you think.