Today we have another couple developer interviews lined up.  First we have Raphael Mun one of the developers of the XNA Community Game sin(Surfing). Mr. Mun thank you for taking time to answer a few questions for us.

Question: How did the idea for sin(Surfing) come about?

Raphael Mun: My friend Greg and I were both interested in making a small game and so we were throwing around some ideas for a while and playing various other games and one of the ideas brought up was that I remembered that in high school we had a class where we sampled different sounds using a microphone attached to an oscilloscope. And the sound-maker I had brought that day, interestingly enough, was an ocarina which produces a pretty much perfect sine wave and thought at the time that it would be really cool to surf inside it. So then Greg suggested looking at a game called Vib Ribbon and we discussed different ways that we could get some solid gameplay out of an oscilloscope and came up with sin(Surfing).

 
Question: sin(Surfing) is a pretty simple game but the quest for getting the highest score can be addictive.  What is your best score?

RM: I worked mostly on the Trick Mode and I think my best there is 730 after figuring out various tricks, but Greg did the Challenge Mode and I have never been very good at it.

 
Question: Why did you decide to release sin(Surfing) as an XNA Community Game verses an online flash game?

RM: The game was originally a submission to the TIGSource Procedural Generation competition and you might be surprised to hear that for such a small game, there’s quite a bit of procedural generation going on inside than it looks, so we never really thought of flash as being a viable option. Plus I got to do some bloom in post-processing for slight overkill which is always fun.

Using managed code and focusing on pumping out the gameplay as fast as we can rather than a more robust engine definitely helped to meet the competition deadline and iterate many more times, and I think trying to do the same in flash would have caused us a few more problems than we would have liked or anticipated, even though it could have been distributed more widely online.
 

Question: Was it difficult to develop and release an XNA Community Game?

RM: The process itself wasn’t bad and really quite simple, but we had moved on to bigger and better things quite a bit already since the original release of the game for the competition back in June. We received a lot of feedback and there was a lot of potential to make it into a larger game but both Greg and I just started our new full-time jobs pretty far away from each other and so I did the porting work to get it to feel right on the Xbox controllers and packaged it up on XNA CG and called it finished for the time being. And also the reviewers were pretty nice and approved it quickly for everyone else to see. We might come back to the game and make it into something more full-fledged but for now we’re off on other projects.

 

Question: Looking back on sin(Surfing) what are the things that you are most proud of?

RM: It’s a pretty nifty game and it was the first time I’d been able to produce a game that looked exactly like the mock-up, which is really what I consider to be the biggest step I’ve been able to take so far in my ability to create games from an original vision. It is so often the case that the final product of a game is nothing like the initial vision, but for such a small game we were lucky that it was possible.
 

Question: Was there anything you were hoping to get into sin(Surfing) that did not make it?

RM: Plenty. When we started the game, I think we had basically 3 days to come up with an idea and get it done by the deadline so we stayed up through all of it and made it happen. I wanted to add more tricks and elements into the game but there really was just no time for it; each new trick would add more programming, animations, trick-combinations, etc. so we had to bring it down to the very basic Crouch, Upside-Down, and Stand character states and come up with all of the ways those can be used in conjunction with directional spins.
 

Question: Now that sin(Surfing) has released are you planning another XNA game?

RM: There are actually a couple of other projects I am currently working on which hopefully will be as interesting to everyone as sin(Surfing), some of which are pretty far in development but I’ll only mention the one that is closest to release called BattleSweeper, being worked on by our team of three. You might be able to guess at least what the game is about but you should be seeing a bit more about the project in the following weeks so keep an eye out! ;)
 

Question: Can you give us some tips, hints, or strategies for sin(Surfing)?

RM: In the game, one thing you might have noticed is the generated equation above on the top-left when you do tricks. That actually represents the exact formula of tricks you are doing. For instance, each time you stand upside-down and then crouch you’ll see the counter for +/- go up, rotations are measured in pseudo-radians indicating what posture you are in, and if you land upside-down you’ll see a nice +U added to the end of the formula.

Now this formula can be manipulated because an upside-down turn counts for more points than a normal or crouch turn but is very slow, but if you crouch to turn almost all of the way around and then finish the rest of the 360-turn in the upside-down position, you will actually get points as if you did the entire turn upside-down. It’s one quick way to raise your points.